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LIBRIS 


AN   INTRODUCTION 

TO   THE 

NEW    TESTAMENT 


AN  -INTRODUCTION 


TO    THE 


NEW    TESTAMENT 


JBY 


ADOLF    JITLICHER 

PROVKSSOR    OF    THEOLOGY   AT    THE    UNIVERSITY    OP    MARBURG 


TRANSLATED   BY 

JANET  PENBOSE  WARD 


WITH 

PREFATORY  NOTE   BY   MRS.   HUMPHRY  WARD 


LONDON 

SMITH,  ELDEE,  &   CO.,  15   WATERLOO   PLACE 

1904 

[All    rights    reserved] 


AUTHOE'S    PREFACE 


*  THE  main  lines  that  I  have  pursued  in  my  treatment  of  the 
Introduction  to  the  New  Testament  were  laid  down  for  me  by 
the  editorial  conditions  of  this  series.1  In  order  not  to  trans- 
gress these  lines  I  have  kept  back  a  good  deal  that  I  would 
otherwise  gladly  have  put  forward  in  defence  of  my  views. 
Nevertheless,  the  book  is  more  voluminous  than  I  could  wish. 
The  second  and  third  parts,  containing  the  history  of  the 
Canon  and  of  the  text,  are  mostly  to  blame  for  this ;  I  was 
least  willing  to  be  sparing  on  this  subject,  because,  as  a  rule, 
it  is  held  of  too  little  account,  whereas  an  insight  into  the 
growth  of  the  Canon  and  the  text  is  calculated  more  than  any- 
thing else  to  bring  about  a  healthy  conception  of  theological 
problems. 

'  The  idea  of  competing  with  a  work  like  Holtzmann's 
"  Introduction  "  has  naturally  never  occurred  to  me.  As 
before,  his  book  will  remain  indispensable  for  exhaustive 
studies  in  this  branch  of  science.  All  I  have  desired  has  been 
to  furnish  an  introduction  to  Holtzmann  and  to  Weizsacker, 
and  to  stimulate  the  interest  of  students  towards  yet  further 
study.  The  expert  will  not  fail  to  detect  that  I  often 
quietly  expound  other  people's  views  while  appearing  only 
to  advance  my  own  ;  and  everyone  knows  that  what  I  have 
brought  forward  in  this  book  has  been  gradually  accumulated 
by  the  faithful  labour  of  whole  generations  and  has  not  been 

1  Grundriss  dcr  Tlieologischen  Wissenschaften,  J.  C.  B.  Mohr,  Tubingen  and 
Leipzig. 


VI  AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    Till-:    NEW    TESTAMENT 

discovered  by  me.     I  shall  not  dispute  priority  with  anyone 
on  the  strength  of  the  present  book. 

*  As  to  readers,  I  only  wish  for  those  who  regard  as  justi- 
fied a  strictly  historical  treatment  of  the  study  of  the  New 
Testament,  but,  granted  this  condition,  a  special  theological 
training  is  not  necessary.     On  the  contrary,  I  hope  to  meet 
a  want  that  undoubtedly  exists,  outside  theological  circles, 
among  people  of  education,  by  telling  the  history  of  the  New 
Testament  from  its  beginnings  in  the  simplest  possible  way, 
confining  myself  to  essentials. 

*  As  this  is  not  an  edition  of  the  text,  or  merely  a  book  of 
reference,  the  Index  is  only  meant  to  facilitate  the  discovery 
of  items  which  are  not  easily  to  be  found  in  the  Table  of  Con- 
tents.' 

The  above  sentences  from  the  Preface  to  the  first  edition 
(1894)  are  still  valid  for  the  present  one.  The  book  has  been 
so  benevolently  judged  by  theological  critics,  as  well  as  by  the 
general  reader,  so  far  as  the  judgments  of  both  have  reached 
me,  that  I  have  not  thought  myself  at  liberty  to  change  any- 
thing essential  in  its  form  and  point  of  view.  If  it  has  un- 
fortunately grown  to  the  extent  of  some  100  pages,  that  is 
merely  the  result  of  an  increase  in  the  new  material  which 
calls  for  consideration  within  the  old  subdivisions.  I  have 
not  confined  myself  to  the  elimination  of  certain  errors  of 
il  which  had  been  pointed  out  to  me,  nor  to  providing 
a  richer  and  more  convenient  supply  of  bibliographical  data 
chiefly  in  the  interests  of  students,  nor  to  making  the  treat- 
ment of  the  different  sections  more  strictly  uniform.  Impelled 
and  enlightened  by  the  contributions  which  German,  English 
and  French  writers  have  made  in  wonderful  fulness  and 
variety  to  New  Testament  science  precisely  during  the  last 
six  years,  I  have  once  more  worked  through  all  problems 
properly  belonging  to  an  '  Introduction,'  and  am  not  ashamed 


PREFACE  Vll 

to  say  that  I  have  attained  to  a  better  insight  in  many  points 
of  importance.  But  even  where  that  was  not  the  case,  1 
found  myself  compelled  to  discuss  new  questions  which 
had  been  raised,  to  put  before  the  reader  new  proposals 
that  had  been  offered  for  the  solution  of  old  problems,  and 
generally  to  make  him  acquainted  with  the  special  circum- 
stances and  influences  affecting  our  subject  (Disciplin)  at  the 
opening  of  the  new  century.1  Though  I  have  not  altered  for 
the  sake  of  altering,  I  hope  that  I  have  throughout  written  as 
I  must  have  written  in  1900  if  no  1894  had  gone  before. 

The  portion  of  the  book  which  has  been  subjected  to  least 
revision  is  the  history  of  the  Canon  :  in  an  outline  like  this 
there  is  simply  no  room  for  the  numerous  additions  which  I 
would  gladly  have  made.  By  far  the  largest  share  has  gone 
to  Part  I.,  the  history  of  the  different  Books  of  the  New 
Testament.  The  Gospel  of  John  and  Acts,  which  had  pre- 
viously come  off  but  poorly,  have  had  justice  done  them  ;  in 
the  case  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels  also,  the  Apocalypse,  the 
Catholic  Epistles,  and  many  Pauline  Epistles,  including  the 
Pastoral  Epistles  and  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  as  well  as 
in  the  introductory  paragraphs  concerning  the  Apostle  Paul, 
it  will  be  found  that  I  have  not  ceased  to  learn. 

I  have  not  yet  been  able  to  meet  the  desire  expressed  by  a 
particularly  valued  critic  that  I  should  open  the  first  chapter 
with  a  brief  history  of  Greek  epistolary  literature :  I  am  un- 
able to  perform  the  task  in  such  a  way  that  the  interpretation 
of  Paul's  letters  would  gain  thereby.  In  other  cases  where  I 
appear  to  have  overlooked  certain  publicly  expressed  objec- 
tions to  my  '  Introduction,'  the  reason  lies  in  the  firmness  of 
my  own  conviction,—  for  instance,  that  the  persons  addressed 
in  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  are  not  Jewish  Christians,  and 
still  less  natives  of  Palestine. 

1  The  preceding  is  not  an  exact  translation,  but  a  paraphrase  of  the 
German,  omitting  certain  controversial  allusions  more  likely  to  be  understood 
by  German  than  by  English  readers. 


Vlll  AN     INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NE\V    TESTAMENT 

Only  one  deficiency  in  my  book  have  I  maintained  on 
principle  :  one  of  my  critics  found  it  not '  theological '  enough. 
If  that  meant  that  I  was  wanting  in  love  for  the  subject  and 
in  understanding  of  it,  and  if  I  failed  to  increase  both  in  my 
readers,  that  deficiency  would  be  the  gravest  conceivable.  As 
that  is  not  the  meaning,  what  is  asked  for  must  either  be  a 
more  detailed  investigation  of  the  world  of  religious  thought 
in  which  the  New  Testament  writers  lived,  or  what  is  called 
*  an  edifying  tone.'  It  is  not  for  me,  however,  to  trespass  on 
the  domain  of  another  science,  that  of  New  Testament 
theology,  nor  to  win  praise  by  a  style  unsuited  to  this  hand- 
book. I  can  only  hope  that  in  a  book  which  ought  to  be 
universally  intelligible,  I  have  never  allowed  myself  to  be 
driven  on  to  a  false  road  by  the  special  interests  of  theology, 
or  the  preconceptions  of  the  theological  '  Docent '  ! 

THE   AUTHOR. 
MARBDRO  :  October  :-Jl,  1900. 


PREFATORY  NOTE 


As  a  member  of  that  section  of  the  general  public  to  which, 
no  less  than  to  professed  students  of  theology,  Dr.  Jiilicher 
addresses  the  book  now  presented  in  English  dress  to  English 
readers,  I  may  perhaps  be  allowed  to  say  two  or  three  pre- 
fatory words.  '  I  hope,'  says  Professor  Jtilicher  in  his 
preface  to  the  last  edition,  '  to  meet  a  want  that  undoubtedly 
exists,  outside  theological  circles,  among  people  of  education, 
by  telling  the  history  of  the  New  Testament  from  its  be- 
ginnings in  the  simplest  possible  way,  confining  myself  to 
essentials.'  At  the  same  time  the  book  has  been  abundantly 
welcomed  by  the  scholars  of  its  subject.  The  first  edition 
appeared  in  1894 ;  the  present  translation  is  made  from  the 
second  edition  ;  and  the  references  to  the  '  Introduction  '  in 
recent  literature  show  that  it  has  obtained  a  recognised  and 
honoured  place  in  German  theological  study.  Professor 
Wrede  of  Breslau,  reviewing  the  first  edition  in  1896,  says, 
*  We  do  not  often  meet  with  a  theological  book  which,  with  so 
solid  a  content,  is  yet  so  clear  and  flowing  in  style  .  .  .  which 
is  never  tedious  and  often  of  absorbing  interest.'  No  doubt 
the  German  reader  is  a  more  patient  and  serious  being  than 
his  English  brother,  and  can  be  trusted  not  to  confound  the 


X  AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTA  MM  XT 

inevitable  difficulty  of  a  great  and  complex  subject  with 
obscurity  or  tedium.  Close  attention,  very  close  attention, 
Professor  Jtilicher  does  certainly  ask  of  us.  But  once  this 
has  been  yielded  him,  the  animated  simplicity  and  sincerity  of 
his  method  will  begin  to  tell  upon  us, — the  method  of  a  man 
full  of  intellectual  energy,  full  also  of  love  for  his  subject ; 
and  we  shall  soon  come  to  realise  the  brilliancy  of  much  of 
his  work.  It  would  surely  be  difficult  to  find  either  in  English 
or  German  a  more  masterly  statement,  within  reasonable 
compass,  of  the  Synoptic  problem,  or  of  the  probable  conditions 
governing  the  composition  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  or  of  the 
difficulties  that  surround  the  Acts,  or,  above  all,  of  the  History 
of  the  Canon  and  the  Text.  Everywhere  we  are  in  contact 
with  a  just  and  vigorous  mind,  dealing  worthily  with  a  great 
subject,  avoiding  indeed  all  merely  edifying  talk,  and  not 
without  a  certain  sharp  and  homely  plainness  on  occasion, 
but  well  stored  all  the  time  with  feeling  and  imagination,  and 
never  insincere.  Dr.  Jiilicher  employs  a  method  of  perfect 
freedom,  but  his  freedom  is  no  mere  cloak  for  critical  license, 
and  his  eagerness  as  critic  or  historian  does  not  rob  him  of 
common  sense. 

As  to  his  relation  to  other  scholars,  all  readers  of  Dr. 
Harnack  will  remember  that  he  speaks  with  special  respect 
of  the  author  of  this  *  Introduction  '  in  the  preface  to  his  own 
1  hronologie  der  altchristlichen  Literatur.'  When  Dr. 
Weiss  on  the  more  conservative  side  and  Professor  Jiilicher 
on  the  liberal  side  agree,  then,  says  Harnack,  it  is  not  neces- 
sary for  any  after-comer  to  reopen  a  question.  '  In  the  case 
of  the  Pastoral  Epistles,  I  regard  the  results  of  Holtzmann 
and  Jiilicher  as  proved,'  says  the  Berlin  professor,  and  he 
presupposes  them  in  his  own  discussion.  There  are,  indeed, 
great  differences  between  the  two  scholars,  as  anyone  who 


PREFATORY    NOTK  XI 

studies  the  treatment  of  the  Johannine  problem,  or  of  certain 
points  connected  with  the  Synoptics,  in  both,  \\\\l  easily 
recognise.  And  the  judgment  of  Jiilicher  on  the  '  pseud- 
epigraphical '  element  in  the  earliest  literature  of  Christi- 
anity is  by  no  means  so  favourable  to  the  documents  as 
that  of  Dr.  Harnack.  But  in  the  main  they  are  not  far 
apart ;  and  at  any  rate  both  stand  firmly  on  the  same  free 
historical  ground,  and  would  hold  it  a  dishonour  to  approach 
their  work  in  any  other  spirit  than  that  of  the  student  and 
seeker  after  truth. 

In  comparison  with  the  great  '  Einleitung  '  of  Dr.  Holtz- 
mann,  the  more  recent  book  shows  a  greater  pliancy  and 
simplicity  of  method,  and  less  Baurian  '  vigour  and  rigour.' 
Dr.  Jiilicher  is  further  removed  from  Tubingen  than  Dr. 
Holtzmann.  His  treatment  is  *  richer  in  historical  points  of 
view  ' ;  his  tone  more  natural  and  varied  ;  while  '  behind  the 
documents  he  looks  to  the  men  and  their  relations,  takes  into 
account  the  influence  of  changing  moods  and  circumstances 
upon  a  writer,'  and  relies  but  sparingly  on  those  fine-drawn 
arguments  based  wholly  on  the  details  of  vocabulary  or  what 
may  be  called  the  psychology  of  style,  which  the  critic  of 
to-day  will  only  use  when  he  must.  His  account  of  the 
'  literature '  of  the  subject  is  much  less  full  than  that  of  Dr. 
Holtzmann ;  but  he  gains  thereby  greatly  in  interest  and 
vivacity  for  the  general  reader,  while  for  the  student  the  two 
books  complete  each  other.  With  Dr.  Theodore  Zahn,  the 
champion  of  '  orthodox '  criticism  in  Germany,  the  '  great 
misleader ' l  in  the  theological  field,  as  Dr.  Jiilicher  calls 
him,  this  '  Introduction  '  will  be  found  constantly  at  feud. 
Here  Jiilicher  stands  on  the  same  ground  with  Harnack. 
Z arm's  vast  and  learned  work  is  the  antithesis  and  the  denial 

1  '  IrrgartnerJ  maker  of  mazes  or  labyrinths. 


Xll  AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 

of  all  that  the  Berlin  and  Marburg  professors  hold  true. 
With  whom  lies  the  future  ?  Can  anyone  doubt,  who  looks 
abroad  a  little  over  the  general  forces  and  tendencies,  the 
efforts  and  victories  of  modern  historical  Wissenschaft  ? 

With  these  few  words,  then,  let  me  commend  this  book  to 
those  who  feel  that  on  these  questions,  these  critical  and 
literary  questions,  with  which  it  deals,  really  depends  our 
future  Christianity.  For  numbers  of  minds  in  England  the 
mere  careful  study  of  Dr.  Jiilicher's  chapters  on  the  Gospels, 
or  on  the  history  of  the  Canon,  would  be  a  liberal  education. 
Pain  might  enter  into  it ;  but  it  would  be  the  pain  of  growth. 
Loss  might  attend  it ;  but  beyond  the  loss,  beyond  the  onset 
and  the  struggle  of  a  fast  advancing  knowledge  there  lies  a 
new  kingdom  of  the  spirit.  The  true  knowledge  of  Christ  is 
in  no  peril :  due-it  opes  animumque  ferro. 

MARY  A.   WARD. 

October  1903. 


TRANSLATOR'S   NOTE 

Tin:  Translator  wishes  to  offer  her  sincere  thanks  to  those 
who  have  kindly  assisted  her  in  translating  or  revising  the 
present  work  :  to  Miss  Margaret  Watson,  who  undertook  part 
of  the  actual  translation,  and  to  Mr.  Leonard  Huxley, 
Mr.  W.  T.  Arnold  and  Professor  Percy  Gardner,  who  by  their 
valuable  suggestions  have  greatly  lightened  wluit  was  at 
times  a  very  difficult  task. 


CONTENTS 


AUTHOR'S   PREFACE  .  .  .v 

PREFATORY  NOTE  TO   ENGLISH   EDITION  ...  ix 

TRANSLATOR'S   NOTE         .......  xii 

PROLEGOMENA. 

§  1.  SCOPE  AND  ARRANGEMENT  OF  NEW  TESTAMENT  INTRODUCTION. 
Definition    of     Introduction     as     Historical     Criiicism 
independent  of  any  Dogmatic  Preconception — Division 
of  the  subject  into  three  parts — Uncertainty  of  Kesults  1-8 

§  2.    A  GENERAL  VIEW  OF  THE   LITERATURE  OF   THE  SUBJECT. 

History    of  Introduction   down  to   the   Reformation — 

Richard  Simon — From  Simon  to  Baur — The  Tubingen 

School — The  Reaction  against  Baur — Present  condition 

of  Criticism — The  modern  Pseudo-Criticism  8-30 


PART    I 

A  HISTOEY  OF  EACH  OF  THE  NEW 
TESTAMENT   WRITINGS 


BOOK    I 

THE   EPISTLES 


CHAPTER   I 
THE  GENUINE  EPISTLES  OF  PAUL 

§  3.     THE  APOSTLE  PAUL. 

His  Life — His  Personality — His  Peculiar  Qualities  as  a 

Writer— The  Duty  of  Criticism  towards  the  Tradition       32-54 
§  4.     THE  FIRST  EPISTLE  TO  THE  THESSALONIANS. 

Contents — Addressees — Circumstances  of  Composition — 

Authenticity  and  Integrity.  ......       54-60 


XIV          AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 

PAOK 

§  5.     THE  SECOND  EPISTLE  TO  THE  THESSALOM 

Contents— Circumstances  of  Composition — Authenticity 

—Question  of  vv.  ii.  1-12 60-68 

§  6.     THE  EPISTLE  TO  THE  GALATIANS. 

Contents — Object  of  the  Epistle — Its  Recipients — Circum- 
stances of  Composition  ......  68-78 

§  7.     THE  Two  EPISTLES  TO  THE  CORINTHIANS. 

Relations  of  Paul  to  the  Corinthians  before  the  First 
Epistle — Motives  for  the  Composition  of  the  First 
Epistle — Contents  of  the  First  Epistle  —Circumstances 
of  Composition — Contents  and  Character  of  the  Second 
Epistle — Time  and  Place  of  Composition  -Its  Cause 
and  Occasion — Two  lost  Corinthian  Epistles — History 
of  the  Community  between  the  First  and  Second 
Epistles — Proposals  for  dismembering  the  Second 
Epistle 78  102 

§  8.    THE  EPISTLE  TO  THE  ROMANS. 

Contents — Time  and  Place  of  Composition — Authenticity 
of  chapters  xv.  and  xvi. — Ch.  xvi.  an  Epistle  to  the 
Ephesians — Object  of  the  Epistle  and  Condition  of  the 

Roman  Community 102-118 

§  9.     THE  EPISTLE  TO  THE  PHILIPPIANS. 

Character  and  Contents — Recipients  and  Object  of  the 
Epistle — Date  of  Composition — Authenticity  and 
Indivisibility  of  the  Epistle 118-125 

§  10.  THE  EPISTLE  TO  PHILEMON 125-127 

§11.  THE  EPISTLKS  TO  THE  COLOSSIANS  AND  EPHESIANS. 

Contents  of  Colossians — Contents  of  Ephesians — Con- 
temporary origin  of  Colossians,  Ephesians  and 
Philemon — The  Community  of  Colossae  and  the 
Occasion  for  Colossians — The  False  Teachers  of 
Colossae — Authenticity  and  Integrity  of  Colossians — 
Object  of  Ephesians — Not  an  Epistle  to  Ephesus — 
Objections  to  its  Authenticity 127-141 

CHAPTER   II 

THE   DEUTERO-PAULINE    EPISTLKS 

§  12.  Tin:   I'.i'isn.i.  TO  TIIK  HEBREWS. 

Theme  of  the  Epistle  and  manner  in  whicli  it  is  csuried 
out — Hebrews  a  true  Epistle — But  not  by  Paul — Date 
of  Composition — Destination — Hypotheses  as  to  the 
Author 148-174 


CONTENTS  XV 

HAOH 

S  13.  THE  PASTORAL  EPISTLES. 

Contents  of  1.  and  2.  Timothy  and  Titus — Close  connec- 
tion between  the  throe  Epistles — Pauline  Authorship 
impossible,  because  (a)  the  Paulino  elements  are  merely 
due  to  dependence  on  Paul,  (b)  the  External  Evidence  is 
unfavourable,  (c)  the  language  is  non-Pauline,  (d)  the 
theological  position  is  that  of  the  Post-Apostolic  Age, 
(e)  the  Epistles  are  psychologically  inconceivable  as 
coming  from  Paul,  and  (/)  it  is  impossible  to  find  a 
place  for  them  in  Paul's  lifetime — The  actual  Circum- 
stances of  Composition — Possible?  Use  of  Genuine 
Fragments  ? 174-200 

CHAPTER   III 

THE    CATHOLIC   EPISTLES 

§  14.  A  GENERAL  SURVEY  OF  THE  CATHOLIC  EPISTLES. 

The  name  *  Catholic  Epistles ' — Close  Relationship 
between  the  seven  Epistles  ...  .  201-204 

§  15.  THE  FIRST  EPISTLE  OF  PETER. 

Contents— Theme  and  Object  of  the  Epistle — Peter  not 
the  Author — Actual  Circumstances  of  Composition — 
Integrity  of  the  Superscription 204-215 

§  16.  THE  EPISTLE  OF  JAMES. 

Contents — Character  and  Object  of  the  Epistle — Its 
Addressees— The  Pretended  Author— The  Real  Author 
— Hypotheses  of  Spitta  and  Harnack  ....  215-229 

§  17.  THE  EPISTLE  OF  JUDE. 

Contents,  Form,  Object  and  Character  of  the  Epistle — Its 

Date  and  Author 229-232 

§  18.  THE  SECOND  EPISTLE  OF  PETER. 

Contents — Object  of  the  Epistle — Its  indications  as  to 
Author  and  Addressees — Authenticity  untenable — 
Dependence  on  Jude — Actual  Circumstances  of  Com- 
position    232-241 

§  19.  THE  FIRST  EPISTLE  OF  JOHN. 

Contents — Object  of  the  Epistle — Date  of  Composition — 

Its  Author  identical  with  Author  of  Fourth  Gospel      .  241  -250 

§  20.  THE  SHORTER  EPISTLES  OF  JOHN. 

Contents  and  Objects  of  2.  and  3.  John — Their  Author 

and  his  relation  to  the  Author  of  the  First  Epistle       .  250-255 


XVI  AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT 


BOOK  II 

THE  APOCALYPTIC  LITEBATURE   OF   THE 
NEW  TESTAMENT 

PAGE 

§  21.  A  GENERAL  SURVEY  OF  APOCALYPTIC  LITERATURE    .        .  256-260 

$  22.  THE  REVELATION  OF  JOHN. 

Contents — Character  of  the  Apocalypse — Its  Object  and 
Plan — The  Apocalypse  a  Jewish- Christian  Product — 
The  Author  according  to  his  own  testimony  and  to  that 
of  the  Tradition — Relation  of  the  Apocalypse  to  the 
other  Johannine  Writings — Date  of  Composition — 
Question  of  Homogeneity 261-291 


BOOK   III 

THE  HISTORICAL  BOOKS   OF   THE  NEW   TESTAMENT 


CHAPTER  I 

THE    FOUR   GOSPELS 

$  23.  GENERAL  REMARKS  ON  THE  GOSPELS. 

The  Name  '  Synoptics  '  for  Matthew,  Mark  and  Luke — 
The  Gospels  according  to  Matthew,  etc. — The  Gospels 

as  Historical  Records      ....  .  292-295 

A.     The  Synoptic  Gospels 

$  24.  CONTENTS  OF  THE  SYNOPTIC  GOSPELS        ....  296-301 
5  25.  THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MATTHEW. 

The  Tradition  as  to  the  Apostolic  authorship  of  Matthew 
untenable — Date  of  Matthew —  Tendency  and  religious 
Attitude  of  Matthew — Its  Literary  Peculiarities — 
Integrity  of  the  Gospel  .  .  .  301-317 

$  26.  THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  MARK. 

Mark  the  Author — Attitude  and  Tendency  of  Mark — 
Date  of  Composition — Literary  Peculiarities — Integrity 
of  the  Gospel 317-1 


CONTENTS  XV11 

PAOH 

§  27.  THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  LUKE. 

The  Tradition  concerning  Luke,  and  his  own  Testimony 
— Objects  and  religious  Attitude  of  Luke — Date  of 
Composition — Literary  Peculiarities  ....  329-338 

§  28.  THE  SYNOPTIC  PROBLEM. 

The  Problem  stated — The  earlier  attempts  at  Solution — 
Effects  of  combining  the  earlier  Hypotheses — First 
Statement :  Mark  is  contained  in  Matthew  and  Luke — 
Second  Statement :  Matthew  and  Luke  made  use  of  a 
second  authority  consisting  in  a  Collection  of  Logia 
(perhaps  that  of  the  Apostle  Matthew  ?)— Third  State- 
ment: Matthew  and  Luke  made  use  of  other 
authorities  besides  Mark  and  the  Book  of  Logia — First 
Hypothesis  :  Was  Mark  also  acquainted  with  the  Book 
of  Logia  ? — Second  Hypothesis :  Dependence  of  Luke 
on  Matthew  improbable 338-867 

§  29.  THE  HISTORICAL  VALUE  OF  THE  SYNOPTIC  GOSPELS. 

Shortcomings  in  their  tradition — Trustworthiness  of  their 
general  picture — Sketch  of  the  Development  of  the 
Gospel  Tradition  as  far  as  Luke 368-383 

B.     John. 
§  30.  THE  GOSPEL  ACCORDING  TO  JOHN. 

Contents  and  Arrangement — Character  of  the  Gospel — 
Its  Integrity — Date  of  Composition :  (a)  Its  Kelation 
to  the  Synoptics;  (6)  The  Post-Pauline  Hellenistic 

Theology 383-402 

§  31.  THE  JOHANNINE  QUESTION. 

External  Evidence — The  '  Presbyter  '  John — Testimony 
of  the  Writer — Impossible  that  the  Writer  should  have 
been  an  Eye-witness — Result 402-429 

CHAPTER  II 

§  32.  THE  ACTS  OF  THE  APOSTLES. 

Contents  and  Plan — Connection  with  Luke — Date  of 
Composition — Tendency — Historical  Value  of  the  Acts 
— Its  Authorities,  especially  the  We-Document — Two- 
fold Recension  of  the  Text  430-456 

§  33.    RETROSPECTIVE   SURVEY   OF   THE    TWENTY-SEVEN    BOOKS 

OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT  456-458 


XVili        AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT 


PART  II 

A   HISTOEY  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT  CANON 


CHAPTER  I 

THE    PRE -CANONICAL    PERIOD    OF   NEW    TESTAMENT    LITERATURE 

PAGE 

§  34.  THE  CANONICAL  AUTHORITIES  OF  THE  APOSTOLIC  AGE. 

The  Old  Testament  the  only  Canon  of  Jesus — Also  the 
only  Written  Canon  of  the  Apostles — Sayings  of  the 
Lord  become  Canonical  side  by  side  with  the  Scriptures 
in  the  Apostolic  Age 459-468 

§  35.    THE    CANONICAL    AUTHORITIES    OF    CHRISTENDOM    FROM 

circa  70  TO  circa  140. 

No  Christian  writing  of  this  time  claims  Canonical 
Dignity — Canonical  Logia  are  taken  from  written 
documents,  but  the  Author  of  2.  Clement  is  the  first  to 
reckon  these  documents  with  the  Scriptures — The 
Apostles  (not  their  Writings)  join  the  body  of  the 
Canon 468-476 

§  36.  THE  PREPARATORY  STAGES  IN  THE   CANONISATION  OF  THE 

NEW  TESTAMENT  SCRIPTURES. 
'  Anagnosis '    in   the     Church     services — Collection     of 

Documents  for  reading  aloud         .....  476-482 

CHAPTER  II 

THE    CREATION    OF   THE   PRIMITIVE   FORM    OF   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT 

CANON  (circa  140-200) 

§  37.  THE  FACTS  OF  THE  CASE. 

Canonisation  of  the  Gospels  in  the  writings  of  Justin — 
Preference  of  oral  tradition  by  Papias — The  twofold 
New  Testament  of  Marcion — Development  of  the  New 
Testament  Canon  from  Justin  to  Thoophi  us— The 
New  Testament  of  Irenaeus,  Tcrtullian  and  Clement  of 
Alexandria — The  Muratorianum  .  .  488-502 


CONTENTS  xix 


§  38.  THE  MOTIVES. 

The  New  Testament  Canon  the  work  of  the  primitive 
Catholic  Church  —  Conditions  of  admission  to  the  New 
Testament  in  the  Muratorianum  —  Conditions  of  Cano- 
nisation with  the  Fathers  —  True  Motives  of  the  Con- 
version of  the  Books  for  Anagnosis  into  Canonical 
Scriptures  —  Markedly  conservative  Character  of  the 
Canonisation  —  Sketch  of  the  Development  of  the  New 
Testament  between  140  and  200  A.D.  .  502-518 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT  CANON  DOWN  TO  THE 
TIME  WHEN  IT  TOOK  ITS  PRESENT  SHAPE 

§  39.  THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    OF    THE    GREEK    CHURCH  FROM 

circa  200-330. 

Uncertainty  of  the  Limits  of  New  Testament  Canon 
characteristic  of  Greek  Church — Canon  of  Origen — 
Canon  of  Eusebius — Canon  of  Greek  Communities 
about  300  A.D 519-533 

§  40.  THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    OF    THE    LATIN    CHURCH    FROM 

circa  200  TO  375. 

Reason  for  extension  of  period — Canon  of  Hippolytus — 
Canon  of  Cyprian  and  the  other  Western  Fathers  down 
to  375  A.D 533-538 

§  41.  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT  OF  THE  SYRIAN  CHURCH  DOWN  TO 

circa  350 538-540 

§  42.  THE  FINAL  SETTLEMENT  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT  IN  THE 

LATIN  CHURCH. 

Hebrews  officially  received  about  400 — Conflict  of  Custom 
with  Ecclesiastical  Decrees — The  Epistle  to  the 
Laodiceans 541-544 

§  43.  THE  FINAL  SETTLEMENT  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT  IN  THE 

GREEK  CHURCH. 
Struggle    over  tho   Apocalypse— Other  Irregularities  in 

Canonical  Limits 544-549 

§  44.  THE  FINAL  SETTLEMENT  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT  IN  THE 

NATIONAL  CHURCHES  OF  THE  EAST  ....  549-551 

§  45.  THE   MAINTENANCE   OF  THE   NEW   TESTAMENT   CANON  IN 

THE  AGE  OF  THE  REFORMATION. 

New  Testament  of  the  Humanists — Council  of  Trent — 
Religious  and  Historical  Criticisms  of  Canon  on  part 
of  Reformers  .  551-555 


XX     AN  INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT 

PAGB 

§  46.  THE  VARIATION  IN  THE  ORDER  OF  THE  DIFFERENT  PARTS 

OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT. 

Importance  of  this  question  in  the  History  of  the  Canon 
— Order  within  the  separate  Sections — Varying  Order 
of  the  Five  Sections  themselves 555-559 

S  47.  RESULT  OF  THE  HISTORY  OF  THE  CANON. 

The  Church  and  the  Canon — The  technical  terms 
Canonical,  Apocryphal,  Scripture,  New  Testament, 
Bible — Permanent  Traces  of  the  gradual  Formation  of 
New  Testament  ,  .  659-566 


PAET  III 

A   HISTORY  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT  TEXT 


CHAPTER  I 

§  48.  THE  ORIGINAL  MANUSCRIPTS. 

All  Autographa  of  New  Testament  Writers  lost — Their 

Writing  Materials — Uncial  and  Cursive  Handwritings  567-572 

CHAPTER  II 

THE   MULTIPLICATION   OF  THE   TEXTS   DOWN   TO   THE    TIME    OF   THE 
INVENTION   OF   PRINTING 

§  49.  THE  ACTUAL  INCREASE. 

The  Increase  regulated  by  the  needs  of  the  Church — 

Varies  in  the  different  Parts  of  the  New  Testament     .  573-576 

§  50.  THE    OUTWARD    FORM  OF  THE   TEXTS   DOWN    TO    ABOUT 

1500  A.D. 

Papyrus  Rolls  succeeded  by  Parchment  Codices,  which 
give  way  about  1200  to  modern  paper — Form  of  the 
later  Manuscripts — Handwriting  in  the  Parchment 
Codices — Colometric  Writing — Elaboration  of  Texts, 
especially  Division  into  Chapters 576-588 

51.  THE   MATERIAL  HISTORY  OF  THE   TEXT   DOWN  TO  ABOUT 

1500  A.D. 

Enormous  Corruption  of  the  Text— Unintentional  Corrup- 
tions— Intentional  '  Emendations '  588-599 


CONTENTS  XXI 

PAOB 

§  52.  THE  WITNESSES  TO  THE  TEXTS  DOWN  TO  1500  A.D.  AS  THEY 

EXIST   TO-DAY. 

Quotations  in  Works  of  Ecclesiastical  Writers — The  Greek 
Manuscripts — The  Translations:  (a)  Their  Value  as 
Records  of  Original  Text ;  (6)  The  Latin  Translations 
(Itala  and  Vulgate) ;  (c)  The  Syriac  Version  (Peshitto)  599-614 

CHAPTER  III 

THE  GREAT  RECENSIONS  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT  TEXT 
SINCE  1516 

§  53.    THE    FORMATION    OF    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    «  TEXTUS 

RECEPTUS  '  (TO  ABOUT  1630). 

Influence  of  Printing  on  the  Text — The  Editiones 
principes  of  1516  and  1521 — Editions  of  Stephanus  and 
Beza— Elzevier's  Textus  receptus  ....  615-618 

§  54.  THE    ATTACKS    ON    THE   '  TEXTUS  RECEPTUS  '  (DOWN    TO 

circa  1830). 

Collections  of  Variants  beside  the  Text — Isolated  Correc- 
tions of  the  Textus  Receptus — System  of  Classifying 
Families  of  Texts 618-621 

S  55.   THE   DOWNFALL   OF   THE    '  TEXTUS   RECEPTUS  '  AND  THE 

LATEST  TEXTUAL  CRITICISM. 

Downfall  of  Textus  Receptus  brought  about  by  Lachmann 
— Tischendorf's  Services  to  the  Text — The  Great 
English  Recensions — Present  Condition  of  Textual 
Criticism— Tasks  and  Prospects  for  the  Future  .  .  621-628 

INDEX  629 


AN   INTRODUCTION 


TO 


THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 


PKOLEGOMENA 

§  1.  The  Scope  and  Arrangement  of  New  Testament 
Introduction 

[Cf .  H.  Hupfeld :  '  Uber  Begriff  und  Methode  der  sogenannten 
biblischen  Einleitung '  (1844),  in  which  he  defines  Introduction  as 
Literary  History  ;  F.  C.  Baur  :  '  Die  Einleitung  in  das  N,T.  als 
theologische  Wissenschaft,'  in  the  Theologische  Jahrbiicher  for 
1850  and  1851,  an  explanation  of  Introduction  as  the  criticism  of 
the  Canon  ;  and  T.  Zahn's  article  entitled  '  Einleitung  in  das  N.T.' 
in  the  Protestantische  Be&l-Encyclopadie,1  vol.  v.  pp.  261-274. 
This  latter  deals  in  a  lucid  manner  first  with  the  history  and  then 
with  the  scope  and  functions  of  New  Testament  Introduction, 
handling  the  matter  as  objectively  as  possible.  Lastly  cf .  G.  Kriiger : 
'  Das  Dogma  vom  N.T.'  (1896),  which  contends  that  what  we  want 
is  a  history  of  the  whole  of  Early  Christian  Literature  irrespective 
of  the  limits  set  by  the  Canon,  and  not  a  mere  Introduction  to  the 
New  Testament.  But  is  there  not  room  for  both  ?  The  larger  task 
need  not  necessarily  displace  the  smaller.] 

1.  THE  name  '  Introduction '  as  applied  to  the  criticism  of  the 
New  Testament  has  itself  to  be  explained.  For  although  we 
may  clearly  understand  that  the  subject  of  it  is  furnished  by 
those  twenty-seven  Books  of  the  Bible  which  are  collectively 
termed  the  '  New  Testament,'  the  word  '  Introduction  '  re- 
mains none  the  less  vague  ;  it  might  include  a  great  variety  of 

1  Edited  by  Hauck,  1896,  and  now  in  a  third  edition. 

B 


2  AN   INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    SEW    TESTAMENT 

preliminary  studies  useful  to  the  understanding  of  the  New 
Testament.  Moreover  its  history  shows  that  no  clear  and 
universally  recognised  conception  of  its  meaning  and  its  place 
within  the  complete  body  of  theological  knowledge  has  yet 
been  evolved  ;  probably  no  single  topic  exists  which  has  been 
included  in  all  Introductions  to  the  New  Testament  without 
exception.  In  by  far  the  greater  number  of  the  more  modern 
productions  we  may  indeed  find  researches  into  the  origin  of 
each  individual  Book  of  the  New  Testament  and  into  the 
history  of  their  collection  into  a  whole ;  possibly,  too,  into 
that  of  the  later  dissemination  of  their  texts ;  but  often  in 
addition  to  these  we  are  confronted  by  a  bewildering  array  of 
digressions  on  questions  of  dogma,  hermeneutics,  grammar, 
lexicography,  philology,  even  of  archaeology  and  geography, 
while  other  productions  of  Early  Christian  literature,  such  as 
the  First  Epistle  of  Clement,  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas,  the 
*  Didache  of  the  Twelve  Apostles,'  are  included  in  the  survey, 
and  the  history  traced  of  the  translation  and  interpretation 
of  the  New  Testament  and  of  its  preservation  in  the  Church 
and  in  literature. 

We  can  never  hope  to  construct  a  uniform  whole  out  of 
this  mass  of  heterogeneous  material.  But  some  such  unity 
is  to  be  obtained  by  defining  Introduction  to  the  New  Testa- 
ment as  that  branch  of  the  science  of  history— or  more 
accurately,  of  the  history  of  literature — which  treats  of  the 
New  Testament.  It  rests  an  open  question  whether  the 
writings  of  the  New  Testament  properly  come  under  the  head 
of  literature  in  the  strict  sense  of  the  word  ;  but  at  all  events, 
it  was  as  literature  that  their  influence  was  felt.  In  very 
truth,  this  fragment  of  the  world's  literature  has  exerted  a 
greater  influence  than  any  other  book  that  has  ever  been 
written.  To  make  it  the  subject  of  a  special  scientific  study 
is  not  merely  permissible  to  a  Christian  theologian  who 
would  advocate  the  view  it  takes  of  life,  but  is  also  a  duty 
of  the  historian,  quite  apart  from  considerations  of  his  own 
faith,  because  without  historical  understanding  of  the  New 
Testament,  whole  passages  of  the  history  of  the  human 
spirit  become  utterly  incomprehensible,  and  others  can  be 
but  imperfectly  understood.  We  select  the  history  of  these 


PROLEGOMENA  3 

particular  twenty-seven  books  from  that  of  the  bulk  of  early 
Christian  literature — to  which  they  essentially  belong — 
because  they  and  no  others  have  played  so  great  a  part  in 
the  world's  history,  not  because  they  may  have  been  the 
earliest  literary  product  of  the  Christian  spirit.  However 
clearly  such  documents  as  the  Gospel  of  Peter,  the  First 
Epistle  of  Clement,  or  the  '  Shepherd '  of  Hermas  may  excel 
certain  parts  of  the  New  Testament  in  age  or  originality,  we 
are  not  actually  obliged  to  include  them  in  the  history  of  the 
New  Testament  except  where  our  understanding  of  certain 
problems  of  literary  history  raised  by  the  New  Testament 
would  be  increased  by  so  doing.  The  '  twin  sister  of  Intro- 
duction,' New  Testament  Theology,  is  in  an  entirely  different 
position,  inasmuch  as  it  has  to  seek  out  its  object — the 
Christian  religion  as  it  first  arose — from  among  the  whole 
body  of  existing  authorities,  whereas  the  object  of  our  own 
study  lies  ready  to  our  hand. 

If,  however,  from  whatever  reasons,  the  limits  of  the  New 
Testament  should  be  so  rigorously  drawn  as  to  exclude  all 
other  early  writings,  even  those  which  are  most  akin  to  it,  we 
should  insist  all  the  more  strictly  that  the  science  of  Introduc- 
tion should  occupy  itself  solely  with  the  New  Testament  as  such, 
and  not  with  subjects  which  it  shares  with  other  books,  such 
as  language,  vocabulary,  geography  and  the  like ;  if  any  New 
Testament  writer  displays  peculiarities  in  these  matters,  the 
fact  should  be  remarked  upon,  but  otherwise  they  belong 
to  different  branches  of  science.  For  this  reason  alone  we 
should  refuse  to  include  within  the  limits  of  Introduction 
proper  such  subjects  as  the  distribution  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment among  the  nations,  its  use  in  the  Church,  its  inter- 
pretation from  the  point  of  view  of  theology  ;  for  in  all 
these  points  the  fortunes  of  the  New  Testament  go  hand  in 
hand  with  those  of  the  Old.  It  is  just  as  unnecessary  to  lay 
stress  upon  such  studies  in  endeavouring  to  form  an  histori- 
cally sound  judgment  of  that  piece  of  the  world's  literature 
which  is  called  the  New  Testament,  as  it  would  be  absurd  to 
expect,  say,  that  in  a  chapter  on  Lessing,  a  history  of  German 
literature  should  discuss  all  the  translations  of  his  works 
into  foreign  languages,  the  measure  of  understanding  and 

B   2 


4  AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT 

misunderstanding  which  he  has  hitherto  met  with,  or  even 
the  attempts  that  have  been  made  to  represent  him  as  the 
champion  of  this  or  that  particular  party.  The  history  of 
the/New  Testament  as  it  should  be  told  in  an  Introduction 
reaches  no  further  than  the  point  where  the  development  of 
the  New  Testament  ceases.  What  new  features  are  added  to 
it  and  how  long  the  process  of  growth  continues — these  are 
the  objects  of  our  study,  but  the  relation  to  the  finished 
product  assumed  by  other  factors  in  the  slow  course  of 
evolution  is  a  question  which  lies  for  the  present  outside 
our  horizon. 

2.  This  definition  excludes  every  dogmatic  preconception — 
all  reference  indeed  to  anything  of  this  nature — and  therefore 
every  ulterior  partisan  object  from  the  pursuit  of  our  study. 
It  does  not  in  the  least  concern  us  to  know  what  claims  were 
made  for  the  New  Testament  three  hundred  years  ago  or  are 
made  for  it  at  the  present  day  by  the  Church ;  we  seek 
neither  to  support  the  divinity  of  the  New  Testament  writings 
nor  to  dispute  and  undermine  it  by  pointing  out  how  absurd 
are  the  assumptions  on  which  the  assertion  of  it  rests. 
Criticism  will  indeed  be  applied  ;  not,  however,  in  order  to 
test  the  value  of  a  dogma,  but  because,  if  the  truth  is  to  be 
reached,  historical  research  can  never  afford  to  do  without 
criticism  in  dealing  with  the  legacy  of  tradition.  It  is  the 
dogmatists'  affair  to  interpret  the  results  of  an  unpreju- 
diced historical  investigation  of  the  New  Testament,  but  it 
is  not  for  historical  scholarship  to  declare  itself  independent 
of  external  criteria  by  adopting  dogmatic  theses  as  the 
starting-points  of  its  critical  work.  The  views  of  the  Church 
concerning  the  New  Testament  Canon  should  be  referred  to 
as  often  as  they  are  necessary  to  enable  us  to  understand 
how  that  Canon  arose ;  but  the  changes  they  have  undergone 
in  later  times  at  the  hands  of  Keformers  or  Rationalists,  or 
through  modern  criticism,  are  no  concern  of  ours  so  long  as 
they  leave  the  actual  contents  of  the  New  Testament  un- 
touched. If,  like  BAUR,  WEISS  and  HOLTZMANN,  we  take  the 
fundamental  interest  of  New  Testament  Introduction  to  be  the 
critical  investigation  of  certain  definite  preconceived  ideas 
of  our  own  on  the  subject  of  the  origin  and  collection  of  the 


PROLEGOMENA  0 

New  Testament  writings,  suspicion  is  aroused  against  the 
strictly  historical  character  of  the  investigation ;  and — while 
indeed  the  programme  is  seldom  carried  out  and  the  discus- 
sion of  these  '  ideas  '  occupies  a  very  small  space — the  place 
which  belongs  to  the  New  Testament  is  usurped  by  the  ideas 
of  later  generations  concerning  the  New  Testament.  Naturally, 
these  ideas  deserve  the  most  serious  attention,  on  account  of 
the  enormous  influence  they  have  had,  but  the  task  of  tracing 
their  development  belongs  to  the  history  of  dogma,  and  that 
of  criticising  them  to  dogmatic  theology.  Those  who  wish  for 
a  true  Introduction  to  the  New  Testament  must  for  the  moment 
lose  all  interest  in  the  thoughts  which  anyone  has  at  any 
time  bestowed  upon  the  New  Testament — even  in  those  of  an 
infallible  Church — and  must  concentrate  all  their  attention 
upon  the  New  Testament  itself. 

3.  If,  then,  an  Introduction  to  the  New  Testament 
means  a  history  of  its  origin,  exempt  from  any  dogmatic 
preconceptions,  we  may  at  once  distinguish  as  its  main 
divisions,  (1)  the  origin  of  the  New  Testament  as  a  whole, 
i.e.  of  the  collection  represented  by  the  New  Testament 
Canon,  and  (2)  the  origin  of  the  individual  parts  of  this 
collection,  i.e.  of  the  twenty-seven  Books.  The  order  in 
which  these  questions  should  be  discussed  depends  almost 
entirely  on  practical  considerations.  Both  possibilities  have 
their  advantages  and  disadvantages,  but  that  of  placing  the 
so-called  '  special  introduction  '  (the  history  of  the  individual 
New  Testament  writings)  first  is  favoured  by  the  con- 
formity of  such  an  arrangement  with  the  actual  course  of 
things ;  for  the  books  must  first  have  been  produced  before 
they  were  collected.  Thus  we  have  decided  to  give  the 
second  place  to  the  History  of  the  New  Testament  Canon. 
But  there  is  yet  a  third  part  to  follow.  The  New  Testa- 
ment did  not  cease  its  development,  its  growth,  at  the 
moment  when  its  Canon  of  twenty-seven  Books  appeared 
complete ;  as  it  was  handed  down  from  one  generation  to 
another  the  text  continually  received  important  modifications 
of  form — in  modern  times,  after  the  introduction  of  printing, 
no  less  than  in  the  earliest  years  after  the  composition  of  the 
Pauline  Epistles — and  thus  we  shall  be  bound  to  assign  a 


6  AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 

third  place  to  the  History  of  the  Neiv  Testament  Text,  in 
which  the  rise  of  the  present  wording  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment will  be  discussed.  In  the  first  our  scrutiny  will  be 
confined  to  the  first  two  centuries  A.D.  ;  in  the  second  we  shall 
be  brought  down  to  the  Middle  Ages — nay,  to  the  very  century 
of  the  Keformation  ;  the  third  takes  us  to  the  present  day. 

The  inclusion  of  Part  III.  as  an  independent  branch  of 
the  literature  of  the  New  Testament  within  the  limits  of 
'  Introduction  '  is  not  to  be  gainsaid  by  the  assertion,  though 
correct  in  itself,  that  a  complete  and  separate  representation 
of  the  manner  in  which  the  Greek  and  Roman  Classics  have 
been  handed  down  to  us  through  manuscripts  and  transla- 
tions has  never  formed  a  special  part  of  the  history  of 
Classical  literature.  Greek  literary  history  is  certainly  little 
adapted  to  form  an  analogy  to  the  literary  history  of  the  New 
Testament ;  but  an  Introduction  to  Homer  similar  to  ours  would 
scarcely  be  able  to  ignore  the  history  of  his  text,  any  more 
than  a  monograph  dealing  with  the  literary  history  of  the 
Sibylline  Oracles  would  be  able  to  ignore  the  intricate  history 
of  the  Sibylline  texts.  No  complete  lists  of  the  different 
manuscripts  and  translations  are  indeed  required  for  our 
purpose,  but  we  shall  certainly  need  whatever  material  is 
necessary  to  convince  our  readers  of  the  growth  and  gradual 
development  even  of  the  smallest  fractions  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment, its  individual  words  and  sentences,  and  to  give  them 
an  insight  into  the  forces  and  laws  by  which  that  growth  was 
governed.  He  who  does  not  know  that  the  New  Testament 
he  possesses  is  in  its  details  but  an  imperfect  form  of  the  real 
New  Testament,  and  why  it  can  be  no  more  than  this,  has 
simply  not  learnt  the  history  of  his  New  Testament  properly. 
In  order  to  fulfil  its  object  it  is  just  as  necessary  that  a 
history  of  the  New  Testament — a  book  in  which  we  are 
confronted  with  claims  of  so  unique  a  character — should 
present  a  history  of  its  text  in  its  main  outlines,  as  that  a 
history  of  the  Apostolic  Symbol,  of  the  Augustana,  of  the 
Decrees  of  the  (Ecumenical  Councils  should  enlighten  us  fully 
as  to  the  changes  which  took  place  in  the  wording  even  of 
what  was  accepted  by  the  Church. 

4.  But   unfortunately    the   ideal   treatment   of   the   New 


PROLEGOMENA  7 

Testament  from  the  point  of  view  of  literary  history  is  not  to 
be  attained.  Our  knowledge  of  the  most  important  questions 
is  extremely  fragmentary,  and  in  the  case  of  the  individual 
writings  in  particular  we  have  practically  no  external  evidence 
to  look  to,  and  are  obliged  to  rely  solely  on  indications  to  be 
obtained  from  the  documents  themselves.  This  state  of 
things  necessitates  a  critical  investigation  of  details  in  which 
hypothesis  is  often  piled  on  hypothesis  ;  no  connected  repre- 
sentation is  attainable,  and  the  hope  of  reconstructing 
a  complete  history  of  the  evolution  of  New  Testament 
literature  vanishes  into  space.  With  but  one  New  Testament 
writer — Paul — does  our  acquaintance  approach  to  intimacy  ; 
his  epistles,  both  in  number  and  length,  are  sufficient  to  give 
us  a  tolerably  clear  idea  of  his  personality  and  his  peculiar 
qualities  as  a  writer  ;  but  the  other  New  Testament  authors 
remain  wrapped  in  obscurity,  no  less  than  the  circles  from 
which  they  sprang  and  the  conditions  under  which  they 
wrote.  We  must  be  content  if  wre  can  approximately  deter- 
mine in  the  case  of  each  New  Testament  Book  when  and  for 
whom  it  was  written ;  whether  the  author  wrote  in  his  owrn 
name  or  in  that  of  another  ;  what  his  principal  object  was  and 
how  he  succeeded  in  expressing  it ;  whether  and  to  what  extent 
he  used  other  authorities,  i.e.  earlier  written  documents,  and 
whether  his  work  has  come  down  to  us  unchanged,  untouched 
by  the  hand  of  a  later  reviser.  Here  in  truth  we  have  but 
the  materials  for  a  history  of  the  New  Testament,  not  the 
history  itself. 

With  regard  to  the  Canon  our  position  is  somewhat  better  ; 
in  the  main  we  know  the  motives  by  which  the  collection  and 
canonisation  of  the  New  Testament  Books  was  guided,  we 
know  the  preliminary  steps  and  the  different  stages  through 
which  the  process  passed,  though  in  detail  there  is  much  that 
yet  remains  undiscovered.  Finally,  for  the  history  of  the  Text 
we  have  indeed  an  enormous  mass  of  evidence  at  our  disposal, 
but  as  to  the  decisive  period  before  the  fourth  century  we  can 
only  be  certain  of  the  bare  fact  that  the  New  Testament  Text 
was  subjected  to  considerable  alteration,  not  of  the  manner 
in  which  it  was  done  or  of  the  definite  results  which  followed. 
There  is  scarcely  a  single  branch  of  science  in  which  the 


8  AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT 

inclination  to  know  everything  for  certain  and  to  have  an 
answer  ready  for  every  question  is  so  universal  as  it  is  in  the 
Introduction  to  the  New  Testament ;  scarcely  any  in  which 
that  inclination  is  so  little  justified.  The  more  decidedly, 
then,  must  we  emphasise  from  the  very  outset  the  fact  that 
our  judgments  can  only  be  absolutely  trustworthy  on  the 
negative  side,  while  our  positive  assertions  can  seldom  rise 
above  the  level  of  probabilities. 


§  2.  A  General  View  of  the  Literature  of  the  Subject 

1.  We  cannot  expect  to  find  anything  resembling  what  we 
now  call  Introduction  in  ancient  times  or  in  the  Middle  Ages. 
Least  of  all  would  anyone  in  those  days  have  thought  of 
studying  the  history  of  the  New  Testament  apart  from  that 
of  the  Old.  The  title  '  Introduction  to  the  divine  Scriptures ' 
(slcraycoyr)  els  ras  Betas  ypa(f)ds)  is  first  met  with  about  450  in 
a  short  treatise  of  134  sections  by  one  ADRiANus,1  otherwise 
unknown,  a  theologian  of  the  school  of  Antioch.  But  his 
book  is  nothing  but  a  piece  of  Biblical  rhetoric  and  didactics  ; 
the  New  Testament  is  scarcely  touched  upon  at  all.  The 
celebrated  M.  AURELIUS  CASSIODORIUS,  SENATOR  (t  about  570), 
does  indeed  recommend  in  his  most  important  theological 
work,  the  'Institutio  divinarum  lectionum,'  the  learned 
Donatist  TycoNius,2  ST.  AuausTiNE,3  EUCHERIUS  OF  LYONS'* 
and  JUNILIUS  AFRICANUS  5  as  '  Introductores  Scripturae 
Divinae  '  as  well  as  the  afore-mentioned  Adrian,  but  he  shows 
by  the  arguments  he  adduces  that  to  him  *  introduction ' 
meant  no  more  than  a  means  to  the  understanding  of  difficult 
passages,  sentences  or  words  of  the  Scriptures.  We  still 
possess  the  books  intact  to  which  Cassiodorius  was  referring : 
Tyconius6  gives  us  but  a  summary  of  hermeneutics  in  his 
Seven  Eules  for  the  study  and  discovery  of  the  meaning  of 
the  Holy  Scriptures ;  Eucherius 7  a  smattering  of  exegetical 

1  Edited  by  F.  Gossling,  1887.  "out  380. 

3  f430.  *  About  450.  -out  550. 

6  Best  edition  by  F.  C.  Burkitt,  in  Texts  and  Studies,  iii.  1  (ls«M). 

7  Best  edition  of  his  Formulae  spiritalis  Intclligcntiae  and  Instructioiiuin 
Libri  II.  by  C.  Wotke,  1894. 


PROLEGOMENA 

sciences  of  a  secondary  order,  while  Augustine  in  the  four 
books  of  his  *  De  Doctrina  Christiana '  at  any  rate  defines 
the  limits  of  the  Holy  Scriptures  and  says  something  of 
the  translations  of  the  original  texts.  But  the  important 
point  in  his  eyes  is  again  but  to  describe  the  equipment 
necessary  for  him  who  would  interpret  the  Bible,  and  the 
idea  that  historical  knowledge,  especially  concerning  the 
origin  of  the  sacred  books,  plays  any  part  whatever  in  such 
an  equipment  he  does  not  consider  worthy  of  mention.  Our 
own  notions  of  the  qualities  required  in  an  introductor 
are  perhaps  best  realised  by  Junilius,  a  court  official  of 
Justinian,  probably  of  African  extraction,  who  in  the  two 
books  of  his  '  Instituta  regularia  divinae  Legis  '  '  gives  us  a 
catechism  of  Biblical  knowledge  in  the  form  of  a  dialogue 
between  master  and  pupil,  in  exact  conformity  with  the 
discourses  of  his  own  master,  the  Nestorian  PAUL  OF  NISIBIS. 
In  the  section  concerning  the  authority  of  the  Scriptures,  for 
instance,  he  distinguishes  between  the  Biblical  Books  of 
absolute  and  of  secondary  authority,  speaks  of  the  authors 
of  the  Divine  Books  and  whence  our  knowledge  of  some  a 
least  of  them  came,  and  discusses  the  modi  scripturarum — 
though  remaining,  as  he  himself  admits,  very  much  '  on  the 
surface  of  the  Scripture.'  Cassiodorius  had  these  five  '  Intro- 
ductions '  written  out  together  in  a  codex  for  the  library  of 
his  monastery,  and  embodied  a  few  items  of  some  value  to  us 
concerning  the  history  of  the  New  Testament  in  his  own 
'  Institutio.' 

All  that  the  Middle  Ages  knew  on  questions  of  Introduc- 
tion was  derived  from  these  sources,  or  else  from  the  informa- 
tion given  by  historians  like  EUSEBIUS,  EUFINUS,  JEROME  and 
ISIDORE  or  by  commentators  and  revisers  of  Biblical  Books 
concerning  the  circumstances  under  which  these  were  written. 
The  more  important  parts  of  such  information  were  usually 
transmitted  in  close  connection  with  the  text  of  the  book  con- 
cerned as  a  superscription  or  postscript.  A  characteristic 
attempt  at  summarising  these  learned  materials  in  concise 
form  is  afforded  by  the  little  book  of  HUGUES  DE  SAINT- 

1  Best  edition   by  H.   Kihn,    Theodorus    von    Mopsuestia    und  Junilius 
Africanus  (1880). 


10  AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 

VICTOR,  the   great   mystic  (tl!41),  entitled   '  Praenotationes 
Elucidatoriae  de  Scriptura  sacra  et  eius  Scriptoribus.' 

2.  After  the  beginning  of  the  Reforming  movement  the 
interest   in   all    questions   relating   to   the   Bible    naturally 
increased,  and  most  markedly  so  in  the  circles  of  the  Roman 
Church  itself.     The  name  Introduction  (eiVaywy?))  for  literary 
productions  of  this  kind  appears  again  at  Lucca  and  Louvain, 
but   none   of   these  works   represent   a  continuation   of   the 
impulse  given  by  Junilius  and  Cassiodorius.     On  the  other 
hand,  a  remarkable  advance  is  shown   by  the   '  Bibliotheca 
Sancta '  of  SIXTHS  OF  SIENA — baptised  Jew,  Franciscan  and 
finally   Dominican — which   appeared    in    1566.     This    is    a 
gigantic    work    divided    into    eight    books,    of    which    but 
one    is    devoted    to    Herrneneutics,    three    are    taken    up 
with  a  history  of  Exegesis  (highly  meritorious,  though  not 
always    trustworthy),   and    the    rest    consists   in  a  positive 
enumeration   of   the   books   declared    by   orthodox   doctrine 
to    be    Canonical,    and    a   defence   of    this   Canon   against 
heretical  objections.     Here  we  regularly  find  information  as 
to   author,  date,  contents   and   order   of   succession   of   the 
different  Biblical  Books,  bearing  witness  to  considerable  read- 
ing and  even  to  the  timid  promptings  of  a  critical  sense.     For 
some   time   Sixtus   remained   unsurpassed    in   the   Catholic 
world,  nor  were  the  kindred  productions  of  Protestants,  which 
appeared   under  very  various  titles,1    of   any  higher  value ; 
criticism  has  no  part  in  them  whatever ;   all  is  subordinated 
to  the  dogmatic  interest.     Historical  material  is  only  made 
use  of  in  so  far  as  it  can  be  made  to  lead  up  to  the  orthodox 
Protestant  view  of  the  Scriptures. 

3.  A  new  epoch  was  inaugurated  for  the  science  of  Intro- 
duction— the  creator  of  which  he  might  be  called — by  RICHARD 
SIMON,  priest  of   the  Oratory  of   Paris,  who   died   in    1712. 
True  that  the  great  Arminian  theologian  and  politician  HUGO 
GROTIUS  (f!645)  had  already  applied  an  impartial  criticism  to 

1  E.g.,  that  of  A.  RIVETUS  (died  in  Holland  in  K351)  :  Isagoge  sivc  introductio 
generalis  ad  sacram  scripturam  Veteris  et  Novi  Testamtnti,  in  qua  eius 
natura,  existentia,  auctoritas,  necessitas,  puritas,  vcrsionum  et  intcrpretum 
rationes  et  modi  indagantur,  eiusque  dignitas,  perfectio  et  usus  advcrsusveteres 
et  novos  script&res  lucifugas  asseritur  et  de  vero  controvtrsiarwn  fidci  iudice 
fusius  disputatur. 


PROLKCiOMKXA  11 

certain  Books  of  the  Bible,  and  examined  their  authenticity 
with  results  not  always  favourable  to  tradition  ;  true,  too,  that 
in  his  wonderfully  suggestive  *  Tractatus  theologico-politicus  ' 
the  philosopher  SPINOZA  (f!677)  had  demanded  an  historical 
understanding  and  an  historical  treatment  of  the  Bible,  and 
shattered,  in  principle,  the  omnipotence  of  dogma  on  that 
field ;  but  both  these  writers  stopped  short  at  occasional 
indications.  Simon,  on  the  other  hand,  published  a  '  History 
of  the  New  Testament'  at  Eotterdamin  1689,1690  and  1692,' 
and  thus  not  only  set  a  new  inquiry  on  foot,  but  proceeded  at 
the  same  time  to  answer  it.2  The  History  of  Exegesis  fills 
indeed  the  greater  part  of  his  space  ;  relics  of  the  older  method, 
such  as  discussions  on  the  inspiration  of  the  New  Testament 
Books,  apologetic  directed  against  Jews,  philosophers  and 
heretics,  dissertations  on  the  style  of  the  Evangelists  and 
Apostles  and  on  the  Hellenistic  tongue  are  to  be  found  even 
here ;  but  the  dogmatic  element  is  merely  nominal,  and 
Simon's  interest  in  the  New  Testament  is  that  of  the  historian. 
Though  the  history  of  the  text  is  the  chief  object  of  his  toil, 
he  manages  to  deal  with  all  the  main  questions  which  we 
shall  discuss  in  the  first  two  parts  of  our  Introduction 
within  230  pages  of  his  first  volume — although,  it  is  true, 
with  varying  degrees  of  energy :  e.g.  Chap.  x.  Du  temps  et 
de  Vordre  de  chaque  evangile  ;  Chap.  xii.  De  r^vangile  de  Sl 
Luc;  ce  qui  Vapu  obliger  de  le  publier,  y  en  ayant  deux 
autres  qui  avoient  este  publies  avant  le  sien;  Chap.  xvi.  (on 
the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews) :  si  elle  est  de  St  Paul  et 
canonique.  Ce  que  I'antiquite  a  cru  la-dessus  tant  dans 
rOrient  que  dans  ^Occident.  Simon  separated  the  New 
Testament  from  the  Old ;  he  gave  the  impulse  towards  the 
treatment  of  the  New  Testament  as  a  branch  of  literary 
history ;  he  drew  attention  to  the  incessant  development 
it  has  undergone,  and  inaugurated  the  philological  and 

1  Part  I. :  Histoire  critique  du  texte  du  Nouveau  Testament ;  Part  II. : 
Histoire  critique  des  versions  du  N.T. ;  Part  III. :  Histoire  critiqiie  des 
principaux  commentateurs  du  N.T,  Valuable  supplements  to  Parts  I.  and  II. 
appeared  in  1695  in  Paris,  entitled  Nouvelles  observations  sur  le  texte  et  les 
versions  du  N.T. :  the  whole  together  taking  up  well  over  2,000  quarto  pages. 

-  Cf.  H.  Margival :  R.  Simon  et  la  critique  biblique  au  XVIP  sUcle  (Paris, 
1900). 


12  AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 

historical  criticism  of  the  New  Testament  with  tact  and  good 
taste.  The  spuriousness  of  the  appendix  to  Mark,  of  John 
vii.  53-viii.  11  and  of  1.  John  v.  7  fol.  was  demonstrated  by 
him,  as  well  as  the  uncertainty  of  the  traditional  text  in 
many  other  places.  That  he  himself  did  not  go  beyond  the 
criticism  of  details — the  so-called  Lower  Criticism — and 
was  satisfied  with  the  tradition  on  the  more  general  ques- 
tions of  the  origin  of  the  separate  books  and  of  the  Canon, 
is  no  blame  to  him  ;  it  was  rather  the  healthy  beginning 
of  historical  investigation,  and  to  this  limitation  more  than 
to  anything  else  he  owed  the  very  great  influence  which  he 
succeeded  in  gaining  over  Protestant  as  well  as  Catholic 
learning. 

At  first,  indeed,  Protestants  and  Catholics  vied  with  one 
another  in  repelling  these  impudent  attacks  on  the  Word  of 
God,  but  how  dependent  on  the  very  thing  they  scorned  were 
those  who  bewailed  the  way  in  which  Simon — '  ad  infrin- 
gendatn  Sanctae  Scripturae  auctoritatem  callidissimus ' — 
'arbitrarily  altered  the  true  text  of  the  New  Testament 
and  treated  the  most  sacred  books  in  the  same  manner  as 
he  would  the  writings  of  any  profane  author,'  is  distinctly 
shown,  for  instance,  by  J. MILL'S  'Prolegomena  in  Novum 
Testamentum '  (1707),  and  by  the  '  Introductio  '  of  the  Frank- 
furt pastor  J.  G.  PRITIUS,  which,  first  published  in  1704, 
made  its  way  to  every  part  of  Germany  in  numerous  editions.1 
In  it  the  writer  defends  the  authenticity  of  everything  in 
the  New  Testament,  even  down  to  the  appendix  to  Mark 
and  1.  John  v.  7  fol.,  but  yet  makes  a  pretence  of  giving  a 
history  of  the  Text,  the  individual  Books  and  even  the 
Canon  (though  this  in  very  summary  form),  as  Simon  had 
done  before  him.  In  addition  to  this,  however,  he  offers  the 
strangest  collection  of  information  introductory  to  the  exegesis 
of  the.  New  Testament ;  thus  chap,  xx.,  for  instance,  treats 
of  the  seventy  disciples,  chap,  xxviii.  of  accents,  chap.  xl.  of 
the  coins  occurring  in  the  New  Testament.  We  must  suppose 
that  even  as  late  as  1776  it  was  thought  desirable  to  popu- 
larise such  useful  services  in  refutation  of  Simon's  classical 

1  The  third  enlarged  and  revised  by  KAPP,  and  the  fourth  by  C.  G.  HOF- 

MANN. 


PROLEGOMENA  13 

works,  for  in  that  year  Pritius's  *  Kritische  Schriften  liber  das 
Neue  Testament '  were  translated  into  German  by  CRAMER 
at  the  suggestion  of  J.  S.  SEMLER. 

4.  In  the  external  history  of  our  subject  conspicuous  im- 
portance must  be  assigned  to  *  Bitter  '  J.  DAVID  MICHAELIS,  a 
Gottingen  Professor  who  died  in  1791  and  whose  *  Einleitung 
in  die  gottlichen  Schriften  des  Neuen  Bundes  '  was  republished 
four  times,1  the  first  edition  consisting  of  636  pages  of  small 
octavo,  and  the  third — even  without  the  index — of  1356  of 
quarto.  Scarcely  any  merit  but  that  of  using  the  German 
tongue  for  the  first  time  can  indeed  be  ascribed  to  the  first 
edition  ;  as  far  as  the  matter  is  concerned  the  improvement 
upon  Simon  is  certainly  not  so  enormous  as  the  prologue 
would  have  us  believe,  while  in  form  everything  is  remarkably 
ill-arranged  ;  the  reader  learns  nothing  whatever,  for  instance, 
about  books  like  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  2.  Peter  and 
Jude,  and  is  merely  referred  to  other  parts  of  Scripture. 
But  from  the  third  edition  onwards  the  material  is  treated 
more  systematically,  and  divided  in  such  a  manner  that 
vol.  i.  contains  the  general  and  vol.  ii.  the  special  intro- 
duction ;  and  although  the  general  part  still  contains  sections 
on  the  language  of  the  New  Testament,  on  its  quotations 
from  the  Old,  on  its  inspiration,  or  on  the  question  '  whether 
our  faith  is  made  insecure  by  the  variants  in  the  New  Testa- 
ment' (§  41),  such  portions  are  clearly  assigned  a  secondary 
place.  Instead  of  the  divinity  of  the  New  Testament  Books 
the  writer  seeks  rather  to  defend  their  genuineness  and 
credibility,  but  ventures  even  so  to  pronounce  the  defence 
'  difficult '  in  the  case,  for  instance,  of  the  Epistle  of  Jude, 
and  to  draw  attention  to  the  fact  that  the  historical  objec- 
tions and  the  dogmatic  complaints  against  the  authenticity 
of  that  Epistle  *  do  but  affect  the  Epistle  of  Jude,  after 
all,  and  not  the  Books  of  the  New  Testament  accepted  as 
Canonical  by  the  earliest  Church,  and  therefore  not  religion 
itself.'  One  would  have  thought  that  distinctions  of  this  sort 
would  have  compelled  a  more  careful  investigation  of  the 
history  of  the  Canon,  but  this  was  only  accomplished  by  the 
above-mentioned  theologian  J.  S.  SEMLER  of  Halle  (t  1791)  in 

1  In  1750,  1765,  1777  and  1788. 


14  AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 

his  '  Abhandlung  von  freier  Untersuchungdes  Kanons '  (4  Parts, 
1771-75).  He  showed  that  the  New  Testament  Canon  was 
the  work  of  men  and  did  not  come  into  being  till  towards  the 
end  of  the  second  century,  simultaneously  with  the  Catholic 
Church,  and  moreover  that  the  judgment  of  these  men  as  to  the 
Apostolicity  of  any  book  ought  not  to  debar  their  descendants 
from  independent  verification.  By  the  distinction  he  made 
between  the  Word  of  God  and  the  Canonical  he  finally  freed 
the  study  of  the  New  Testament  from  the  fear  of  destroying 
religion  or  faith  by  its  results.  Semler  did  not  accomplish 
any  connected  attempt  at  an  '  Introduction,'  nor  was  the  gift 
of  presentation  or  of  the  skilful  distribution  of  his  material 
vouchsafed  to  him  ;  he  cannot  be  acquitted  of  a  tendency 
towards  eccentric  assertion,  and  yet  by  his  numerous  mono- 
graphs on  subjects  connected  with  the  New  Testament  he  gave 
a  mighty  impulse  to  research  in  all  departments,  and  in  some 
actually  advanced  it — e.g.  by  his  demonstration  that  the 
Apocalypse  and  the  Gospel  of  John  could  not  possibly  have 
come  from  one  and  the  same  hand. 

5.  In  the  century  that  has  elapsed  since  the  death  of 
Semler  incredible  industry  has  been  devoted,  especially  in 
Germany,  to  the  study  of  the  New  Testament,  and  in  spite  of 
various  attempts  of  the  reactionary  party  to  compel  a  return 
to  the  traditional  opinions,  it  has  followed  the  principles  and 
the  methods  of  free  historical  investigation  more  and  more 
closely.  But  from  this  time  onwards  the  great  advances 
made  in  our  subject  have  depended  less  on  the  works 
embracing  the  history  of  the  New  Testament  as  a  whole 
than  on  the  monographs  dealing,  say,  with  the  Pastoral 
Epistles,  the  Johannine  writings  or  the  Gospels,  and  on  the 
numerous  commentaries  upon  each  separate  Book  of  the  New 
Testament.  F.  SCHLEIEBMACHER'S  doubts  as  to  the  genuine- 
ness of  1.  Timothy  were  soon  extended  to  2.  Timothy  and 
Titus  ;  the  right  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  the  Apoca- 
lypse, the  Catholic  Epistles,  to  bear  the  names  of  their  sup- 
posed authors  was  denied  with  ever  greater  insistence  and 
on  ever  new  grounds.  At  first,  indeed,  the  mere  love  of 
criticising  outstripped  the  need  for  a  positive  estimation 
and  understanding.  The  disputes  on  authenticity  left  no  room 


PROLEGOMENA  15 

for  an  appreciative  analysis  of  the  documents  criticised,  and  as 
a  natural  consequence  an  insatiable  desire  arose  for  setting  up 
new  hypotheses  on  all  critical  questions.  The  more  startling 
and  ingenious  they  were,  so  much  the  better,  and  a  steady 
and  well-founded  advance  from  sure  to  less  certain  ground 
was  seldom  to  be  met  with. 

This  phase  of  the  study  of  Introduction  was  typified  on 
its  questionable  side  by  the  '  Einleitung  in  das  N.  T.'  of 
F.  GOTTFRIED  EICHHOEN,  the  poly-historian  of  Gottingen  l— 
a  work  full  of  broad  deductions  and  extraordinary  inter- 
pretations— and  on  its  favourable  side  by  the  *  Lehrbuch 
der  historisch-kritischen  Einleitung  in  die  kanonischen 
Biicher  des  N.  T. '  of  W.  M.  L.  DE  WETTE,  the  great  Biblical 
scholar  (died  at  Basle  in  1849) — a  book  which  went  through 
five  editions,  the  first  appearing  in  1826  and  the  fifth 
in  1848.  Unfortunately  the  history  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment Canon,  together  with  much  indispensable  matter 
besides,  must  here  be  sought  for  in  the  Introduction  to 
the  Old  Testament,  while  the  first  section — dealing  with 
the  original  language  of  the  New  Testament — is  superfluous 
in  the  form  in  which  he  presents  it ;  the  writer's  attitude 
towards  critical  problems  varies  very  much  with  the  different 
editions,  and — chief  defect  of  all — he  thinks  more  of  telling 
us  the  opinions  of  theologians  about  the  New  Testament 
Books  than  of  giving  us  a  plain  account  of  the  Books 
themselves  ;  but  his  work  is  rendered  useful  even  to  students 
of  to-day  by  its  wealth  of  carefully  collected  information  on 
the  literature  and  history  of  research,  by  the  uniformity  of 
its  treatment,  the  free,  sober,  earnest  tone  of  its  criticism 
and  the  lofty  and  objective  attitude  of  its  author,  who  is, 
if  anything,  too  sparing  of  his  words.  In  opposition  to  the 
critical  tendencies  prevailing  at  that  time,  the  cause  of 
tradition  was  upheld  by  the  Catholic  J.  L.  HUG  of  Freiburg, 
whose  '  Einleitung  in  die  Schriften  des  N.  T.'s '  appeared  first 
in  1808,  and  the  fourth  edition  in  1847.  This  elegantly 
written  work,  which  excels  in  the  art  of  satisfying  all  the 
wishes  of  the  Church  while  maintaining  an  air  of  complete 
open-mindedness,  has  exercised  a  great  influence,  which  would 

1  In  five  vols.,  1804-1827. 


16  AX    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 

have  been  quite  comprehensible  even  if  the  learning  and  tact 
of  the  writer  had  not  in  truth  hit  the  mark  often  enough  as 
compared  with  the  exploits  of  the  innovators.  But  its 
greatest  interest  to-day  is  for  the  ecclesiastical  historian, 
who  may  study  the  difference  between  the  Catholicism  of 
the  beginning  of  the  century  and  the  Catholicism  of  the 
present  day  to  great  advantage  by  comparing  Hug  with 
the  more  recent  works  of  Introduction  from  the  hands  of 
Catholics — e.g.  with  CORNELY'S  '  Historica  et  critica  introductio 
in  Novi  Testamenti  libros  sacrosanctos,'  vols.  i.  and  iii. 
(Paris,  1885  and  1886),  or  with  A.  SCHAFER'S  '  Einleitung  in 
das  N.  T.'  (Paderborn,  1898). 

C.  AUGUST  CREDNER  (died  at  Giessen  in  1857)  rendered 
excellent  service  by  his  numerous  and  valuable  works  in  all 
departments  of  New  Testament  Introduction  ;  he  did  not 
live  to  carry  out  the  plan  of  an  Introduction  which  he  drew 
up  (although  the  first  part  of  such  a  work  appeared  in  1836), 
but  the  task  was  undertaken  in  his  stead  by  the  Strasburg 
professor  EDWARD  KEUSS  (I*  1891),  whose  '  Geschichte  der 
heiligen  Schriften  des  N.  T.'s  '  first  appeared  in  1842  and 
reached  a  sixth  edition  in  1887.  The  most  important  parts 
of  this  very  attractively  written  book  are  those  concerned  with 
the  history  of  the  translations  and  of  Exegesis  (§§  421-600), 
which,  however,  we  cannot  regard  as  belonging  to  our  subject ; 
and  in  spite  of  the  title  '  Geschichte  der  Entstehung  der  Neu 
Testamentlichen  heiligen  Schriften,'  the  first  section  deals 
with  the  Epistles  of  Clement  and  of  Barnabas,  the  Clementines, 
the  Catholic  Gospels  of  the  Birth  and  Childhood,  Hernias, 
the  Symbolum,  etc.,  in  exactly  the  same  way  as  with  James 
or  1.  Peter.  In  the  many  decades  during  which  it  has 
survived,  this  work  has  not  only  increased  considerably  in 
bulk,  but  its  venerable  author  has  with  untiring  energy  and 
never-failing  independence  of  judgment  continued  to  supple- 
ment and  improve  it  and  to  discuss  the  views  put  forward  in 
more  recent  works.  So  much,  however,  has  undergone 
transformation  in  our  branch  of  science  since  1842  that  not 
even  the  art  of  a  Reuss  could  succeed  in  entirely  suppressing 
all  traces  of  antiquation  in  the  latest  editions. 

6.  The  most  revolutionary  change  in  the  treatment  of  the 


PROLEGOMENA  17 

history  of  the  New  Testament  proceeded  from  the  TUBINGEN 
SCHOOL,  so  called  from  its  head,  the  Tubingen  Professor 
FERDINAND  CHRISTIAN  BAUR  (f  1860).  Its  most  distinguished 
members  (among  whom  David  Friedrich  Strauss  cannot 
strictly  be  reckoned)  are  E.  ZELLER,  ALBRECHT  SCHWEGLER, 
K.  K.  KOSTLIN,  ADOLF  HILGENFELD  (of  Jena)  and  GUSTAV 
VOLKMAR  (of  Ziirich,  f  1891),  and  among  the  younger  genera- 
tion, with  whom  the  original  point  of  view  continually  under- 
goes new  and  important  modifications,  CARL  HOLSTEN  of  Heidel- 
berg (f  1896),  and  OTTO  PFLEIDERER  of  Berlin.  The  organ  of 
this  school,  pre-eminetotly  devoted  to  studies  connected  with  the 
history  of  primitive  Christianity  and  of  the  New  Testament,  was 
the  series  of  '  Theologische  Jahrbiicher  '  which  appeared  from 
1842  to  1857.  Since  1867  a  periodical  of  similar  tendencies 
and  contents  has  been  published  at  Leyden,  entitled  the 
'  Theologisch  Tijdschrift,'  the  contributors  to  which  are  Dutch 
theologians,  disciples  for  the  most  part  of  J.  H.  SCHOLTEN 
(t  1885),  who  allowed  themselves  to  be  converted  with 
their  master  to  the  historical  views  of  the  Tubingen  School 
about  the  beginning  of  the  sixties.  Before  this,  however, 
Baur  had  already  found  friends  in  France  :  EDMOND  SCHERER, 
for  instance,  there  upheld  the  principal  doctrines  of  the 
Tubingen  School  from  the  year  1850  onwards,  and  TIMOTHEE 
COLANI,  editor  from  1850  to  1869  of  the  '  Revue  de  Theologie,' 
was  conspicuous  among  those  who  shared  his  views.  In 
England  a  few  isolated  stragglers  who  have  appeared  since 
1870  have  gained  no  influence. 

It  is  usual  to  designate  the  Tiibmgen  writers  briefly  as 
*  tendency-critics,'  because  in  the  case  of  every  book  of  the 
New  Testament  they  inquire  first  of  all  into  the  '  tendency ' 
it  was  meant  to  serve.  But  the  epoch-making  qualities 
of  their  criticism  are  thereby  but  poorly  rendered.  The 
reproach  that  they  tore  asunder  the  single  unity  formed 
by  the  New  Testament  documents  and  scattered  it  over 
two  centuries  is,  however,  still  less  appropriate ;  what  was 
great  in  Baur's  work  was  rather  his  demand  that  these 
documents  should  not  be  regarded  each  in  a  separate  light 
as  the  accidental  products  of  any  one  religious  personalitv, 
but  should  be  grasped  in  close  connection  with  the 


18  AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 

history  of  Christianity,  as  the  necessary  outcome  of  a 
particular  phase  in  its  development.  The  key  to  the 
knowledge  of  this  history  Baur  thought  he  had  discovered 
in  the  antagonism  between  Paul  and  the  Primitive  Apostles, 
between  the  representative  of  a  law -freed,  universalist 
Christianity  and  the  champions  of  a  Messianic  creed  in  bond- 
age to  all  the  prejudices  of  Judaism.  This  struggle,  he  con- 
siders, gradually  became  less  and  less  acute  from  the  second 
Christian  generation  onwards ;  concessions  were  made  by 
both  sides,  and  a  middle  course  was  finally  agreed  upon  in 
order  to  save  the  very  existence  of  the  Church  in  the  face  of 
the  hatred  of  Jews  and  Gentiles,  and  the  disintegrating 
tendencies  of  Gnosticism.  A  theology  at  once  super-Pauline 
and  super-Judaistic  became  the  foundation  for  the  one 
Catholic  Church,  which  at  once  proceeded  to  seal  the  compact 
by  the  creation  of  the  New  Testament  Canon,  thereby 
recognising  all  the  Apostles  without  exception  as  the  highest 
authority,  as  though  no  difference  of  opinion  had  ever  existed 
among  them.  As  this  view  of  the  early  history  of  the 
Church  is  essentially  drawn  from  New  Testament  writings — 
Galatians,  1.  and  2.  Corinthians,  the  Apocalypse  (!) — so  its 
logical  consequence  must  be  the  arrangement  of  those  writings 
along  such  a  line  of  development ;  if  they  are  really  historical 
authorities  they  must  stand  in  intimate  relation  to  the  dispute 
which  formed  the  very  life  of  the  history  of  the  time.  They 
must  have  their  definite  place  upon  the  line  that  runs  from 
the  Judaists  of  Jerusalem  of  about  the  year  40  to  the  cham- 
pions of  the  Catholic  Church  of  about  200,  such  as  IRENAEUS 
of  Lyons  or  TERTULLIAN  of  Carthage ;  all  of  them,  without 
exception,  must  be  written  in  the  interests  either  of  strife  or  of 
reconciliation.  This  then,  in  Baur's  view,  explains  why  \ve 
possess  documents  under  the  names  of  Paul,  Peter  or  John,  the 
'  spuriousness '  of  which  is  beyond  question;  in  this  manner  the 
later  writers  appealed  in  entire  good  faith  to  the  great  authori- 
ties of  their  party  for  the  defence  of  that  which  seemed  to  them 
indispensable.  The  divergency  between  their  own  point  of 
view  and  that  of  these  old  authorities  they  did  not  perceive,  and 
we  can  now  reconstruct  tho  course  of  development  within  the 
Pauline  party  by  the  writings  of  the  so-called  Paul  and  his 


PROLEGOMENA  19 

disciple  '  Luke,'  as  we  can  the  gradual  emancipation  of  thn 
Primitive  Apostolic  tendency  from  its  one-sidedness  and  the 
extinction  of  the  antagonism  between  it  and  Paul  in  the 
Catholic  Epistles,  Matthew,  Mark  and  the  Johannine  writings. 

Thus  the  only  witnesses  left  from  the  earliest  period  of 
Christianity  before  70  A.D.,  would  be  four  Pauline  Epistles— 
Gaiatians,  1.  and  2.  Corinthians  and  Koinans — and  the 
Apocalypse  of  the  Apostle  John,  a  document  of  the  bitterest 
hatred  against  Paul,  inspired  by  Ebionism  of  the  narrowest 
type  ;  while  the  earliest  record  of  the  higher  synthesis  would 
be  the  Fourth  Gospel  (quite  close  to  which  come  the  Johan- 
nine Epistles),  written  some  time  after  160.  2.  Peter 
belongs  more  or  less  to  the  same  period,  and  was  written 
with  the  object  of  pronouncing  a  sort  of  canonisation  of  the 
Epistles  of  his  arch-enemy  Paul  through  the  mouth  of  Peter. 
Not  long  before,  the  Pastoral  Epistles  had  exhorted 
the  flock  to  put  all  their  strength  into  the  overthrow  of 
Gnosticism,  having  already  lost  all  sense  of  what  had 
hitherto  made  union  so  difficult — the  alternative  implied  in 
the  question  of  Faith  and  Works.  The  rest  of  the  New 
Testament  Books  spring  from  the  time  of  the  attempts  at 
mediation,  a  statement  which  applies  particularly  to  the 
Synoptics  and  the  Acts.  In  their  present  form  the  Synoptics 
can  only  be  understood  as  arising  from  the  interests  at  work 
during  the  period  of  assimilation  in  the  second  century ; 
Matthew  is  the  conciliatory  recast  of  a  Judaistic  original, 
just  as  Luke  rests  upon  a  strictly  Pauline  '  Primitive  Luke,' 
while  Mark,  a  compilation  of  excerpts  from  Matthew  and 
Luke  with  the  omission  of  all  that  might  foster  a  recollection 
of  the  original  feud,  is  the  Gospel  of  neutrality  ;  its  '  tend- 
ency '  is  the  absence  of  tendency.  The  Acts,  however,  are 
pervaded  even  down  to  the  most  trifling  details  by  the  funda- 
mental idea  of  setting  up  a  parallel  between  Peter  and  Paul, 
of  representing  the  leaders  of  the  two  contending  parties  as 
similar  in  word  and  deed,  intentions  and  effects,  and  thus  of 
winning  support  through  history  itself  for  the  new  watchword 
'  Peter  and  Paul.' 

A  large  number  of  the  theses  laid  down  by  the  Tubingen 
School  have  been  proved  to  be  untenable.  Even  within  the 


20  AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 

school  itself  the  fact  was  recognised,  and  first  asserted 
definitely  by  HILGENFELD,  that  among  the  Epistles  bearing 
the  name  of  Paul,  1.  Thessalonians,  Philippians  and  Philemon 
could  not  be  ascribed  on  grounds  of  internal  evidence  alone 
to  any  other  than  the  writer  of  Galatians  and  Corin- 
thians, and  that  a  conciliatory  tendency  had  only  been 
forced  upon  them.  Nor  could  it  be  permanently  denied  that 
even  external  evidence  forbade  us  to  assign  any  large  number 
of  New  Testament  writings  to  a  date  so  far  into  the  second 
century.  But  the  most  important  point  is  that,  thanks  to 
the  labours  of  HOLSTEN,  the  majority  of  the  Tubingen  critics 
now  admit  that  it  is  impracticable  to  regard  Peter  and  the 
Primitive  Apostles  as  the  champions  of  extreme  Judaism  at 
all,  but  that  Peter  rather  maintained  towards  the  Judaistic 
agitators  an  attitude  of  greater  freedom  and  mildness  in 
comparison  with  the  uncompromising  hostility  of  Paul,  that  in 
fact  his  point  of  view  was  not  very  clearly  defined.  In 
short,  they  recognise  that  here,  too,  the  antagonism  is  in  a 
certain  sense  the  later  growth,  and  a  relatively  tolerant  unity 
the  primitive  condition.  But  the  historical  system  of  Baur 
suffers  above  all  from  the  mistake,  first,  of  over-rating  the 
importance  of  Judaism  in  the  early  days  of  Christianity 
and  of  ascribing  to  Paul  alone  the  championship  of  uni- 
versalistic  tendencies  and  the  edification  of  Gentile  Christ- 
ian communities,  and,  secondly,  of  insisting  with  rigid 
one-sidedness  that  the  history  of  primitive  Christianity 
was  dominated  till  far  into  the  second  century  by  the 
sole  interest  of  the  battle  round  the  Law  and  the  pre- 
rogatives of  the  Jews ;  whereas  in  reality  this  battle  was 
only  one  factor  among  many  in  the  formation  of  its  history, 
and  innumerable  Christians  of  the  first  two  generations  not 
only  did  not  understand  it,  but  did  not  even  know  anything 
about  it.  It  is  not  mainly  from  ideas  and  principles  that  a 
new  religion  draws  its  life  :  the  decisive  influences  are  emo- 
tions, feelings,  hopes  ;  and  Baur's  picture  of  the  historical 
development  of  the  Apostolic  and  post- Apostolic  ages  is 
too  logical  and  correct,  too  deficient  in  warmth  of  colour  to 
have  probability  on  its  side.  Nevertheless  the  fact  remains 
that  Baur  inaugurated  a  new  epoch  in  the  study  of  the  New 


PROLEGOMENA  21 

Testament,  not  only  by  his  numerous  flashes  of  new  and  un- 
erring insight  on  questions  of  Introduction  as  well  as  of 
exegesis  and  New  Testament  theology,  hut  principally  hy  the 
fact  that  he  raised  the  pursuit  of  this  branch  of  science  to  a 
higher  level,  and  did  away  with  the  subjective  and  detached 
method  of  investigation.  Since  Baur's  day  the  literary  history 
of  the  New  Testament  can  no  longer  be  dealt  with  apart  from  its 
connection  with  the  history  of  Christianity  as  a  whole  ;  he 
has  taught  us  to  regard  the  Books  of  the  New  Testament 
from  a  truly  historical  point  of  view,  as  the  products  of  and 
the  witnesses  to  the  Christian  spirit  of  a  definite  age. 

Of  Blur's  writings  the  most  important  for  our  subject 
are :  '  Die  Christuspartei  in  Korinth '  (an  essay  in  the 
'Tubinger  Zeitschrift  fiir  Theologie  '  for  1831,  pp.  61  fol.), 
'  Paulus,  der  Apostel  Jesu  Christi,  sein  Leben  und  Wirken, 
seine  Brief e  und  Lehre  '  (1845  and  1866),  '  Kritische  Unter- 
suchungen  iiber  die  kanonischen  Evangelien '  (1847)  and 
the  comprehensive  summary  of  his  system  in  the  '  Kirchen- 
geschichte  der  drei  ersten  Jahrhunderte '  (1853).  His 
immediate  disciples  did  no  more,  for  the  most  part,  than 
carry  out  the  ideas  of  their  master  in  individual  portions  of 
the  literature  of  the  New  Testament,  but  an  exception  to  this 
rule  was  formed  by  SCHWEGLER,  who  in  his  '  Nachapostolisches 
Zeitalter  in  den  Hauptmomenten  seiner  Entwicklung '  treated 
his  subject  in  such  a  way  that  it  included  a  discussion  of 
almost  all  the  writings  of  the  New  Testament.  HILGENFELD 
produced  a  '  Historisch-kritische  Einleitung  in  das  N.T.'  in 
1875,  in  which  he  gave  the  history  of  the  individual  docu- 
ments between  that  of  the  Canon  and  that  of  the  Text.  Not 
only  in  questions  of  the  authenticity  of  Pauline  Epistles  or 
the  dating  of  spurious  writings  were  his  decisions  more  con- 
servative than  Baur's  ;  even  in  the  case  of  the  Gospels 
he  gave  up  the  attempt  to  explain  the  divergencies  between 
them  solely  on  the  ground  of  their  different  interests,  and 
accordingly  placed  Mark  at  any  rate  between  Matthew  and 
Luke.  The  post-Apostolic  age,  in  so  far  as  it  continued  to 
produce  New  Testament  writings  at  all,  he  considered  to 
have  been  influenced  rather  by  the  persecution  of  the  Christ- 
ians undertaken  by  the  Roman  State,  and  by  the  internal 


22  AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 

crisis  produced  by  Gnosticism,  than  by  the  antagonism  be- 
tween the  parties  of  the  Primitive  Apostles  and  of  Paul  which 
dominated  the  Apostolic  age  itself.  Both  before  and  after 
the  appearance  of  this  *  Einleitung  '  he  repeatedly  advanced 
and  defended  the  same  views  as  those  put  forward  there  in 
numerous  essays  and  monographs,  large  and  small.  But 
unfortunately  there  is  a  certain  self-willed  obstinacy  in  this 
clearly  and  smoothly  written  book,  which  will  never  allow 
the  writer  to  go  back  upon  what  he  has  once  asserted,  and 
which  makes  its  appearance  even  outwardly,  in  the  different 
treatment  he  bestows  on  his  materials  according  as  he 
spends  a  greater  or  less  degree  of  interest  and  industry  upon 
them.  Still  further  removed  than  Hilgenfeld  from  the  pre- 
judices of  Baur  is  OTTO  PFLEIDERER,  whose  tastefully  written 
work  on  '  Das  Urchristentum,  seine  Schriften  und  Lehren ' 
(1887,  891  pp.  ;  new  edit.  1902)  deals,  as  we  might  expect  from 
the  title,  with  all  the  problems  of  Special  Introduction  to  the 
New  Testament.  Here  the  breach  between  Paulinism  and  the 
Christianity  of  the  Primitive  Apostles,  the  community  of 
Jerusalem,  is  represented  as  far  slighter  from  the  outset,  and 
the  reconciliation  as  having  been  effected  by  Paul  him- 
self ;  a  decisive  factor  in  the  development  of  Christianity 
is  recognised  in  Hellenism,  which,  however,  did  not,  in  the 
writer's  opinion,  suddenly  force  its  way  into  the  Church  in  the 
middle  of  the  second  century,  and  then  produce  a  complete 
falling-away  from  the  old  ideas,  but  was  already  at  work  in 
the  mind  of  Paul ;  while  in  those  of  the  later  generations  it 
was  continually  forming  new  and  peculiar  combinations  with 
the  primitive  Christian  spirit. 

7.  The  merit  of  having  induced  the  Tubingen  School  to 
change  its  tone  does  not  belong  to  the  party  of  bitter  opposi- 
tion which  rose  up  against  it  from  the  most  diverse  quarters. 
The  fanatical  outcry  against  the  heresy  of  Baur,  as  raised, 
for  instance,  by  H.  THIERSCH  in  Marburg,  T.  PETER  LANGE  in 
Bonn,  and  H.  EBRARD,  with  his  heavy  facetiousness,  in 
Erlangen,  affected  only  those  circles  which  had  no  need  of  such 
influence,  and  the  *  Isagogik '  of  PROF.  GUERICKE  of  Halle— 
strictly  correct  in  an  ecclesiastical  sense — has  long  since 
fallen  into  oblivion.  Some  profit  might,  however,  be  found 


I'ROI.KHOMKN  A  -13 

even  at  the  present  day  in  G.  V.  LECHLER'S  '  Apostolisches  und 
Nachapostolisches  Zeitalter '  (3rd  edit.  1885),  which  gives  a 
sort  of  history  of  each  individual  document  of  the  New 
Testament  by  means  of  a  running  discussion  of  the  Tubingen 
propositions,  but  does  not  venture  to  support  the  tradition 
under  all  circumstances,  as,  for  instance,  in  the  case  of 
2.  Peter.  But  highest  in  point  of  intelligence  among  those 
whose  dogmatic  standpoint  forced  them  into  an  uncom- 
promising opposition  to  all  negative  criticism  was  Prof. 
J.  C.  K.  VON  HOFMANN  of  Erlangen  (t  1877),  who  was 
never  able  to  complete  the  detailed  exposition  of  the  New 
Testament  which  he  had  in  his  mind  ;  his  lectures,  however, 
on  so-called  Introduction  to  the  New  Testament  were  edited  by 
VOLCK  in  1881  as  the  ninth  part  of  that  work.  But  they 
contain  not  a  word  on  textual  history,  and  the  account  of 
the  rise  of  the  New  Testament  Canon  is  worse  than  inadequate 
(it  fills  just  eight  pages),  while  the  examination  of  the 
individual  documents  is  also  unequal  and  sometimes  incom- 
plete. Hofmann  ends  by  justifying  the  tradition  of  the 
Church  in  the  case  of  all  the  books  of  the  New  Testament : 
even  2.  Peter,  he  considers,  is  from  the  hand  of  the  Apostle ; 
even  Hebrews  as  well  as  the  three  Pastoral  Epistles  was 
written  by  Paul  after  his  first  imprisonment ;  but  as  in  his 
exegesis  and  analytical  reproduction  of  the  documents  in 
question,  so  in  his  criticism  of  them,  Hofmann  shows  himself 
to  be  a  past  master  in  the  art  of  preferring  the  far-fetched 
and  the  improbable  to  the  natural  and  the  obvious. 

Nevertheless  theologians  were  never  wanting  who  pro- 
tested against  the  Tubingen  ideas  while  sharing  Baur's 
attitude  of  ireedom  towards  tradition  and  dogma.  This  may 
be  said  without  qualification  at  least  of  E.  KEUSS,  of  the 
celebrated  Church  historian  K.  HASE  of  Jena,  of  that  gifted 
and  imaginative  Frenchman  ERNEST  BENAN,  author  of  the 
'  Histoire  des  origines  du  Christianisme,' !  and  of  the  Heidel- 
berg professoi  DANIEL  SCHENKEL  ;  while  in  the  main  it  is  also 
true  of  H.  EWA.LD,  from  whose  furious  attacks  on  Baur  no  one 
would  guess  how  frequent  is  the  agreement  even  in  detail 
between  the  two  scholars.  Among  the  supporters  of  the 

1  Seven  vols.,  1863-1883. 


24  AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 

theology  of  compromise  represented  by  SCHLEIERMACHER,  F. 
BLEEK  of  Bonn  (t  1859)  rendered  conspicuous  services  in  the 
study  of  the  New  Testament.  His  '  Einleitung  in  das  N.  T.' 
appeared  posthumously,  edited  by  J.  F.  BLEEK  (1862),  and 
the  third  and  fourth  editions  were  carefully  and  piously 
revised  by  W.  MANGOLD  in  1875  and  1886  in  accordance  with 
the  progress  of  knowledge  up  to  that  time.  In  the  pre- 
liminary remarks  to  this  work,  which  is  still  widely  read  at 
the  present  day,  relics  of  the  old  Introductions  may  yet  be 
found,  in  the  shape  of  paragraphs  on  the  original  language  of 
the  New  Testament  Books  and  the  character  of  the  Greek 
in  which  they  are  written  ;  the  order,  too,  in  the  first  main 
division,  dealing  with  the  origin  of  the  individual  books,  is 
remarkable  ;  the  four  Gospels  and  Acts  are  there  placed  first 
and  the  Pauline  Epistles  second,  but  here  the  arrangement 
suddenly  ceases  to  follow  the  traditional  order  of  the  Canon, 
and  is  determined  by  the  chronological  order  of  their  com- 
position. Otherwise  this  somewhat  prolix  work  (it  covers  1085 
pages)  has  many  merits  ;  the  writer  combines  a  warm  love  of 
his  subject  and  great  discretion  in  judgment  with  wide 
knowledge  and  many-sided  interests,  while  in  controversy  he 
always  maintains  a  standard  of  high-bred  decorum.  Many 
shortcomings  which  were  due  to  his  excessively  conservative 
bent  have  been  made  good  by  the  more  drastic  proceedings  of 
Mangold,  though  here  the  reader  is  too  often  perplexed  by 
the  discrepancy  between  Bleek's  text  and  Mangold's  notes, 
which  contradict  one  another  flatly,  for  instance,  in  such 
questions  as  that  of  the  second  imprisonment  of  Paul. 
Much  has  also  been  suffered  to  remain  in  the  text  which  the 
editor  afterwards  proves  to  be  either  inaccurate  or  erroneous. 
In  its  general  attitude  Bleek's  *  Einleitung'  is  far  too 
similar  to  that  of  DE  WETTE  to  have  had  the  pover  to  break 
the  influence  of  the  Tubingen  School ;  Baur's  historical 
system  was  not  to  be  combated  by  pointing  out  a  few  diffi- 
culties and  improbabilities  contained  in  it ;  it  vas  necessary 
to  replace  it  by  n  wholly  different  conception  of  the  period  of 
history  it  covers,  in  which  its  mistakes  should  be  avoided 
while  its  established  results  should  not  be  ignored.  It  was 
ALBRECHT  RITSCHL  of  ft-ottingen  (t  1889)  who,  as  early  as  1846, 


PROLEGOMENA  2") 

in  his  *  Das  Evangelium  Marcions  und  das  kanonische 
Evangelium  des  Lucas,'  and  afterwards  in  his  '  Entstehung  der 
altkatholischen  Kirche'  (esp.  the  2nd  edit.,  1857), showed,  while 
keeping  strictly  to  the  methods  of  Baur,  that  the  Tubingen 
over-estimate  of  the  importance  of  Jewish  Christianity  was 
unwarranted,  and  that  Hellenic  thought  was  a  powerful  auxi- 
liary factor  in  the  formation  of  the  primitive  Catholic  Church. 
Beyond  this  Ritschl  himself  took  no  part  in  the  special  study 
of  the  New  Testament,  and  his  own  views  on  the  develop- 
ment of  Primitive  Christianity  might  with  advantage  have 
been  corrected  and  supplemented  in  many  ways  ;  he  under- 
rates the  influence  of  the  Jewish  element,  for  instance,  in  the 
Early  Church,  and  systeniatises  where  it  is  rather  a  question 
of  individualities  ;  but  almost  all  students  of  the  present  day 
who  possess  any  independence  of  judgment  are  agreed  that 
it  is  the  great  merit  of  Ritschl  to  have  shown,  in  the  most 
convincing  manner,  what  was  the  chief  defect  in  the  historical 
> ystem  of  the  Tubingen  School. 

8.  At  the  present  day  we  have  little  to  fear  from  the 
one-sidedness  of  that  school,  but  all  the  more  from  the 
arrogance  of  the  party  of  tradition,  which  behaves — and 
endeavours  so  to  persuade  the  public — as  though  the  labours 
of  Baur  had  left  our  knowledge  in  exactly  the  same  state 
as  it  was  in  before.  A  glance  at  the  works  of  Introduc- 
tion most  widely  read  in  Germany  to-day  will  confirm 
this  statement.  They  are  H.  J.  HOLTZMANN'S  '  Lehrbucli 
der  historisch-kritischen  Einleitung  in  das  N.  T.'  (1885, 
1886  and  1892)  ;  B.  WEISS'S  «  Lehrbuch  der  Einleitung  in 
das  N.  T.'  (1886,  1889  and  1897)  ;  F.  GODET'S  '  Einleitung 
in  das  N.  T.'  (1893  sqq.,  translated  from  the  French)1  and 
T.  ZAHN'S  *  Einleitung  in  das  N.  T.'  in  two  volumes  published 
respectively  in  1897  and  1899.'2  These  works  are  carried  out 
on  very  different  scales ;  Godet  and  Zahn  present  only 
Special  Introduction,  for  which  Zahn  covers  1150  pages  in 
all,  Godet  378  for  the  Pauline  Epistles  alone ;  whereas 
Weiss  and  Holtzmann  with  500  pages  apiece  give  us  not  only 

1  As  yet  only  vols.  i.  and  ii.  have  appeared,  in  incomplete  form,  vol.  i.  on 
the  Pauline  Epistles,  and  vol.  ii.  on  the  Gospels  and  Acts. 

2  A  second  edition  of  both  volumes  appeared  in  1900. 


26  AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 

this  but  also  the  history  of  the  Canon  and  the  New  Testament 
Text  (Weiss  at  any  rate  a  sketch  of  this  last) ;  while  Holtzmann 
adds  an  appendix  conspicuous  for  its  precision  and  exhaug- 
tiveness  on  the  New  Testament  Apocrypha.  Holtzmann's 
special  merit  is  that  he  gives  full  and  always  accurate 
information  as  to  the  arguments  employed  by  both  sides  on 
each  controverted  question  ;  indeed  his  objectivity  sometimes 
goes  too  far,  in  that  his  own  well-reasoned  judgment  does 
not  always  appear  clearly  enough  above  the  mass  of  opinions 
and  ideas  he  quotes  from  other  writers.  The  object  of  Weiss, 
on  the  other  hand,  is  rather  to  state  each  problem  plainly  and 
lucidly  and  then  to  solve  it,  and  he  seldom  allows  the  reader 
to  perceive  how  many  objections  may  be  and  have  been  raised 
against  his  attempts  at  solution.  Godet,  with  his  edifying  tone, 
never  lays  firm  hold  of  any  single  problem  ;  what  he  gives 
us  is  a  sermon  on  the  New  Testament  Books  richly  adorned 
with  quotations  and  occasionally  ingenious  and  striking,  but 
the  very  opposite  of  a  guide  to  methodical  investigation. 
Zahn  excels  in  coolness  and  confidence,  and  presents  us  with 
an  enormous  wealth  of  individual  disquisitions  of  great 
learning,  as  well  as  with  many  original  combinations  of  ideas. 
But  only  one  of  these  four,  Holtzman,  follows  the  good 
traditions  of  German  criticism — and  moreover  without  any 
school  preconceptions— in  pointing  out  the  very  different 
degrees  of  certainty  with  which  we  can  proceed  to  formulate 
decisions  within  its  domain.  The  three  others  regard  the 
'  authenticity '  of  every  New  Testament  Book — with  the 
exception  of  Hebrews,  which,  however,  does  not  even  profess 
to  be  by  Paul — as  above  all  question,  although  indeed  with 
this  shade  of  difference  between  them,  that  Weiss  looks 
upon  the  negative  critics  merely  as  purblind,  Godet  as 
impious,  and  Zahn  as  stupid  and  malignant.  Thus  the 
ecclesiastical  tradition  is  saved,  and  even  ADOLF  HARNACK  in 
his  preface  to  the  '  Chronologic  der  altchristlichen  Literatur ' ] 
sees  a  time  approaching  '  in  which  we  shall  no  longer  trouble 
ourselves  much  about  the  deciphering  of  problems  of  literary 
history  in  connection  with  Primitive  Christianity,  because  the 
thing  which  it  is  our  main  object  to  prove,  viz.  the  essential 

1  1897,  vol.  i.  p.  x. 


PR()LK(!O.MKNA  27 

trustworthiness  of  the  tradition,  with  few  important  excep- 
tions, will  have  attained  universal  recognition.'  In  the 
whole  of  the  New  Testament,  according  to  Harnack,  there 
is  probably  but  a  single  document  which  can  be  called 
pseudonymous  in  the  strictest  sense  of  the  word — the  Second 
Epistle  of  Peter. 

To  me,  however,  this  new  cult  for  the  '  tradition  ' — by 
which,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  Harnack  understands  something 
quite  different  from  the  *  tradition  '  of  Zahn  and  his  followers 
—seems  quite  as  questionable  as  the  earlier  prejudice  against 
it ;  we  shall  indeed  have  to  take  it  as  our  starting-point 
again  and  again,  but  we  must  always  be  prepared  to  leave  it. 
What  violent  means  must  be  used  in  order  to  assert  the  truth 
of  the  tradition  from  beginning  to  end,  may  be  gathered,  as  we 
know,  from  Zahn's  book.  Harnack,  indeed,  exclaims  at  the 
end  of  the  above-quoted  Preface,  '  It  is  in  history,  not  in 
literary  criticism,  that  the  problems  of  the  future  lie,'  thus  as 
it  were  condemning  Zahn's  dogmatism  in  advance.  But  is  it 
possible  to  write  history  at  all  without  including  literary 
criticism  ? 

A  work  like  Carl  Weizsacker's  *  Apostolisches  Zeitalter 
der  christlichen  Kirche ' 2  has  proved  with  masterly  skill  how 
intimately  connected  is  the  history  of  the  earliest  Christianity 
with  that  of  the  literature  of  the  New  Testament.  There  we 
find  the  history  of  New  Testament  literature  interwoven  with 
that  of  the  primitive  Christian  religion  during  the  first 
century  of  its  existence,  and  nearly  all  the  New  Testament 
Books  analysed,  examined  and  given  their  true  value  at  their 
proper  place ;  nor  can  any  unprejudiced  reader  fail  to 
recognise  the  convincing  force  that  belongs  to  this  presenta- 
tion of  history,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  the  writer  avoids  all 
polemical  discussion.  But  is  Weizsacker's  book,  which  gives 
the  most  perfect  expression  to  one  of  the  fundamental 
ideas  of  Baur,  calculated  to  confirm  '  the  essential  trust- 
worthiness of  the  tradition  '  ?  Perhaps  Zahn's  '  Einleitung  ' 
has  convinced  Harnack  since  then,  that  the  time  of  *  universal 

1  P.  viii. 

-  1886  and  1892  ;  translated  into  English  for  the  Theological  Translation 
Library  (Williams  and  Norgate),  by  James  Millar,  B.D.  1894. 


AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 

recognition '  in  the  matter  of  problems  of  literary  history 
connected  with  Primitive  Christianity  is  still  far  distant,  and 
that  we  may  not  relinquish  the  tasks  set  by  the  study  of 
Introduction  as  though  they  were  already  accomplished,  but 
must  labour  more  strenuously  than  before  for  their  discharge 
in  the  light  spirit,  in  a  loftier  tone  than  of  old,  and  without 
the  former  pretence  of  universal  knowledge,  the  traffic  in 
hypotheses,  and  the  mania  for  accumulating  details — short- 
comings, all  of  them,  of  which  the  « Traditionalists  '  may 
be  accused  no  less  than  the  '  Critics.' 

No  very  great  advance  in  the  study  of  Introduction  can 
be  expected  in  the  immediate  future.  Lost  literature  of  the 
first  century  will  scarcely  be  restored  to  us  by  discoveries  in 
the  monasteries  of  Syria  or  the  sand  of  Egypt ;  we  must  be 
content  with  what  we  already  possess.  And  here  literary 
criticism  will  do  well  to  return  to  a  closer  union  with  separate 
exegesis  and  so-called  New  Testament  theology.  The  chief 
blame  for  the  mistakes  of  the  Lower  and  the  Higher  Criticism 
is  due  to  faultiness  of  exegesis,  which  is  still  very  general  in 
spite  of  the  abundance  of  good  commentaries.  The  science 
of  New  Testament  Introduction  cannot  aspire  to  be  more  than 
a  coadjutor  in  the  history  of  the  origin  of  the  Christian  religion  ; 
by  that  aim  she  should  limit  her  range  and  estimate  the 
value  of  her  results. 

9.  Brief  mention  must  finally  be  made  of  a  form  of 
pseudo-criticism — for  it  has  itself  deprecated  the  name  of 
hyper-criticism — which  considers  itself  called  upon  simply  to 
«pset  all  previous  views  of  the  development  of  the  earliest 
Christian  literature.  It  had  a  precursor  about  1840  in  BRUNO 
BAUER,  a  theologian  of  Berlin,  whose  doctrine  was  that  the 
great  figures  of  the  New  Testament,  Jesus  and  Paul,  must 
be  regarded  as  literary  fictions  and  Christianity  as  the  product 
of  Koman  popular  philosophy.  In  the  last  twenty-five  years 
similar  theories  have  been  put  forward  in  Holland  by  A.  PIER- 
SON,  A.  D.  LOMAN,  VAN  MANEN  and  NABER,  but  in  Germany 
Tery  few  serious  investigators  have  as  yet  taken  up  the  idea  ; 
among  them,  however,  are  R.  STECK  of  Berne  with  his  '  Der 
Galaterbrief  nach  seiner  Echtheituntersucht,  nebst  kritischen 
Bemerkungen  zu  den  paulinischen  Ilauptbriefen  '  (1888),  and, 


PROLEGOMENA 

in  principle,  the  Swabian  professor  D.  VOLTER,  now  in  Amster- 
dam. These  modern  sceptics  differ  from  one  another  in  innu- 
merable points,  but  they  are  all  agreed  in  asserting  that  the 
chief  Pauline  Epistles  are  precisely  those  which  cannot 
possibly  spring  from  the  historical  Paul,  but  belong  to  the 
time  immediately  before  Marcion,  in  whom  the  development 
from  below  upwards,  the  antinomian  tendency,  reached  its 
highest  point.  Here  the  Acts  must  actually  serve  to  throw 
suspicion  on  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians  ! 

We  shall  decline  to  make  the  smallest  compromise  with 
such  a  system,  first,  because  Epistles  like  those  to  the 
Galatians  and  the  Corinthians  appear  to  us  to  be  beyond 
the  range  of  forgery,  if  only  on  account  of  the  many 
'  illogical,'  incongruous  things  that  they  contain,  highly 
natural  as  these  would  have  been  in  the  situations  implied  ; 
secondly,  because  we  can  find  no  room  in  the  second  cen- 
tury for  the  artist  who,  immediately  before  the  authority- 
loving  Marcion,  proceeded  with  a  sovereign  disdain  for  all 
authority  to  create  the  authorities  for  the  next  stage  of 
development ;  and,  thirdly,  because  we  reject,  as  an  idea  that 
has  never  been  found  consistent  with  history,  the  fundamental 
assumption  that  the  Christianity  of  the  year  50  was  connected 
by  an  exact  and  rigid  line  of  evolution  with  the  Christianity 
of  a  hundred  years  later.  The  miserable  ambition  of  explain- 
ing historical  personages  as  the  mere  products  of  their  age, 
of  calculating  them  out  as  though  they  were  a  mechanical 
combination  of  the  factors  that  determined  the  intellectual 
life  of  their  time  and  their  surroundings,  is  not  likely  to  be 
fulfilled  in  face  of  the  great  men  of  the  world's  history.  The 
jiuthor  of  the  '  principal '  Pauline  Epistles  will  always  remain 
to  a  certain  extent  a  mystery  to  us,  whether  we  look  for  him 
in  the  second  or  the  first  century.  In  short,  this  latest  school 
seems  to  me  to  be  no  more  than  a  symptom  of  disease,  which, 
however,  is  the  less  to  be  feared  because  to  all  appearances 
the  tendency  to  find  a  solution  for  every  difficulty  that  may 
confront  exegete  or  critic,  in  the  light-hearted  rejection  of 
documents  as  spurious,  or  to  fill  up  the  gaps  in  our  knowledge 
with  piquant  conjectures  and  ingenious  ideas,  is  growing 
weaker  and  weaker  throughout  the  whole  field  of  historical 


30 


AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 


research.  It  is  to  be  hoped  that  this  may  soon  be  said  of  a 
thing  but  little  less  offensive  :  the  passion,  if  not  for  declaring 
the  great  Epistles  themselves  to  be  non-Pauline,  at  least 
for  robbing  them  of  all  value  by  the  assertion  that  they 
are  full  of  interpolations,  and  by  the  endless  production 
of  irresponsible  conjectures.  Unfortunately,  the  example 
in  this  department  was  set  by  C.  H.  WEISSE,  otherwise  a 
scholar  of  great  repute,  and  was  followed  in  Holland 
by  J.  W.  STRAATMANN  and  M.  A.  N.  ROVERS,  and  in  Germany 
by  E.  SULZE  and  D.  VOLTER.  Indeed,  the  production  of  schemes 
for  the  dismemberment  of  New  Testament  Books  will  soon 
reach  its  utmost  limit ; l  the  partition  of  the  Epistles  to  the 
Corinthians  by  H.  HAGGE  and  H.  Lisco  may  be  called  typical 
of  its  methods.  If  these  gentlemen  are  right,  the  Almighty 
must  have  set  from  90  to  120  hands  in  motion  during  the 
first  and  second  centuries,  to  produce  a  mutilation,  unparal- 
leled elsewhere,  of  all  the  New  Testament  texts,  with  the 
sole  object  of  creating  a  field  for  the  brilliant  display  of  the 
ingenuity  of  modern  theologians,  for  whom  no  other  task  is 
now  worthy  of  notice. 


1  A  complete  account  of  them  down  to  1894  may  be  found  in  Ci 
Die   EinJieitlichkeit   der  pauliniscln  tin  der  Hand  der   bisher  mit 

Bezug    nuf    .sie    aufgestellten    Interpolations-    uud    Compilationshypothcsen 
gepriift  (1894). 


PART    I 


A   HISTORY  OF  EACH  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT 
WRITINGS 


[Cf.  besides  the  works  mentioned  in  §  2,  the  Commentaries  on 
the  New  Testament  as  a  whole,  which  usually  pay  particular  atten- 
tion to  questions  of  Introduction.  Special  mention  must  be  made, 
however,  of  those  edited  by  H.  A.  W.  Meyer  and  by  H.  Holtzmann. 
The  '  Kritisch-exegetisches  Commentar  iiber  das  Neue  Testament ? 
of  the  former  appeared  in  1882  in  16  vols.,  in  which  1.  and  2. 
Thess.  and  Hebrews  were  undertaken  by  G.  K.  G.  Liinemann,  1. 
and  2.  Tim.,  Titus  and  the  Catholic  Epistles  by  J.  E.  Hiither, 
Revelation  by  F.  Diisterdieck  and  the  rest  by  the  Editor.  The 
more  recent  editions  have  been  entrusted  to  others ;  B.  Weiss 
has  undertaken  the  greater  part  of  the  work,  but  several  sections 
have  already  been  re -edited  twice  over.  We  shall  mention  the 
newest  editions  at  the  head  of  each  of  our  §§,  under  the  title  of 
H.  A.  W.  Meyer.  But  as  the  original  unity  of  design,  tone 
and  scale  has  disappeared,  so  the  value  of  the  different  vols.  is  by 
this  time  very  unequal ;  all,  however,  have  a  tendency,  while  pro- 
fessing to  examine  the  evidence  impartially,  to  concede  as  little  as 
possible  to  '  negative  '  criticism  and  to  make  the  New  Testament 
writers  appear  as  the  representatives  of  the  author's  own  moderate 
Protestant  orthodoxy.  A  typical  example  of  this  is  afforded  by 
Sieffer  's  commentary  on  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians.  The 
abundant  criticism  at  first  applied  to  older  commentators — under- 
taken on  no  very  clear  principles  and  from  differing  points  of  view- 
has  been  to  an  increasing  extent  abandoned  in  the  newer  editions. 
The  '  Hand-Commentar  zum  Neuen  Testament '  of  H.  J.  Holtz- 
mann,1 with  contributions  by  R.  A.  Lipsius,  P.  W.  Schmiedel  and 
H.  von  Soden,  is  a  work  which  confines  itself  almost  entirely  to  a 
practical  interpretation  of  the  New  Testament  texts  and  to  a  brief 

1  First  appeared  in  1889  in  Freiburg-i.-Br.,  but  parts  of  it  have  now 
reached  a  third  edition. 


AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT       [CHAP. 

answering  of  questions  of  literary  and  religious  history  by  the 
help  of  the  most  trustworthy  authorities.  The  five  volumes  of 
Zockler  and  Strack's  '  Commentar  zu  den  heiligen  Schriften  der 
Alten  und  Neuen  Testamente  '  which  deal  with  the  New  Testament, 
reached  a  second  edition  in  1897  ;  here,  too,  the  editors  were 
assisted  by  other  writers — Nosgen,  Luthardt,  Schnedermann, 
Wohlenberg,  Burger  and  E.  Eiggenbach,  the  value  of  whose  work 
varies  considerably.  But  even  if  we  ignore  Nosgen's  plaintive 
contribution,  it  is  impossible  to  recommend  this  Commentary  as  a 
whole,  because  the  writers'  conservative  interest  too  often  stands 
in  the  way  of  a  clear  understanding  of  the  texts.  An  English 
parallel  to  Meyer  is  afforded  by  the  '  International  Critical  Com- 
mentary,' in  which  the  uniformity  of  tone  and  value  has  as  yet 
been  well  maintained  in  spite  of  the  large  number  of  contributors  ; 
but  unfortunately  the  greater  part  of  the  work  has  not  yet  appeared. 
C.  Weizsiicker's  c  Das  Neue  Testament  iibersetzt '  (of  which  the 
9th  edition  appeared  in  1899,  Freiburg-i.-Br.)  is  such  a  master- 
piece of  translation  that  it  almost  supplies  the  place  of  a  com- 
mentary to  the  attentive  reader.] 


BOOK  I 

THE   EPISTLES 
CHAPTEE   I 

THE    GENUINE    EPISTLES    OF   PAUL 

[Cf.  B.  Weiss  :    '  Die  paulinischen  Briefe  im  berichtigten  Text, 
rait  kurzer  Erlauterung '  (1896,  pp.  682).] 

§  3.     The  Apostle  Paul 

[Consult  besides  F.  C.  Baur  and  E.  Eenan  (see  above,  pp.  17- 
A.  Hausrath:  'Der  Apostel  Paulus'  (1872)  and  M.  Krenkel : 
'  Paulus,  der  Apostel  der  Heiden  '  (1869)  and  '  Beitrage  zur 
Aufhellung  der  Geschichte  und  der  Briefe  des  Apostels  Paulus  ' 
(1890).  Also  F.  Spitta :  '  Zur  Geschichte  und  Literatur  des 
Urchristentums  '  (1893),  vol.  i.  pp.  1-108  on  '  Die  zweimalige  romi- 
sche  Gefangenschaft  des  Paulus,'  and  pp.  109-154  on  the  2nd 
Epistle  to  the  Thessalonians  ;  C.  Clemen  :  '  Die  Chronologic  der 


§  3.]  THE   APOSTLE    PAUL  38 

paulinischen  Brief e '  (1893) ;  and  '  Ihre  Einheitlichkeit,  etc.'  (1894  ; 
see  esp.  p.  20) ;  W.  M.  Eamsay  :  '  St.  Paul  the  Traveller  and  the 
Roman  Citizen '  (1895)  and  '  St.  Paul  in  the  Acts '  (1898),  which 
latter  is  rather  a  persistent  defence  of  the  Acts  than  a  biography 
of  Paul ;  O.  Cone :  '  Paul  the  Man,  the  Missionary  and  the 
Teacher  '  (1898),  and  Adolf  Harnack  :  '  Chronologie  der  altchrist- 
lichen  Literatur'  (1897).  Of  this  last,  vol.  i.,  pp.  233  fol.  deal 
with  the  '  Chronologie  des  Paulus  und  das  Todesjahr  des  Petrus 
und  des  Paulus,'  and  assign  the  Conversion  of  Paul  to  the 
year  30,  his  arrest  at  Jerusalem  to  Easter,  54,  and  his  arrival 
in  Eome  to  the  spring  of  57,  after  which  the  writer  assumes 
that  he  was  released,  that  he  departed  on  fresh  journeys,  was 
imprisoned  for  the  second  time  in  Borne  and  finally  executed 
in  64.  On  the  other  hand,  Zahn  in  the  2nd  Appendix  to  vol.  ii.  of 
his  '  Einleitung,'  though  he  also  favours  the  second  imprisonment, 
assigns  the  execution  to  66  or  even  67,  the  conversion  to  the 
beginning  of  35  and  the  arrest  in  Jerusalem  to  58.  More  to  the 
point  is  E.  Schiirer's  article  in  the  '  Zeitschrift  fur  wissenschaftliche 
Theologie,'  1898,  entitled  '  Zur  Chronologie  des  Lebens  Pauli.' 
Besides  these  works,  all  chiefly  concerned  with  questions  of 
biography  and  literary  history,  there  are  those  bearing  on  the 
religious  aspect  of  the  question,  such  as  A.  Sabatier's  '  L'Apotre 
Paul,'  1882,  and  O.  Pfleiderer's  '  Der  Paulinismus  '  (1890)  of  which 
even  the  1st  edition  (1873)  is  not  at  all  out  of  date.] 

1.  The  man  to  whose  extant  writings  we  shall  first  turn 
our  attention  was  a  Jew  of  the  purest  Jewish  blood  (Gal.  ii. 
15,  i.  13  fol. ;  2  Cor.  xi.  22  ;  Rom.  xi.  1  ;  Philip,  iii.  4  fol.) 
and  belonged,  according  to  his  own  account,  to  the  tribe  of 
Benjamin.  Jerome  tells  us  that  he  was  born  in  the  little 
Galilean  town  of  Gischala,  and  if  this  is  correct — which  is, 
however,  doubtful — Paul  and  his  family  must  have  migrated 
very  early  to  Tarsus,  the  capital  of  Cilicia.  In  the  Acts  he 
is  simply  mentioned  as  '  a  man  of  Tarsus  '  ;  but  according 
to  xxii.  3,  he  was  also  born  there,  and  certainly  such  a  title 
could  hardly  have  been  applied  to  him  if  he  had  merely  made 
a  passing  sojourn  in,  Tarsus  during  one  of  his  missionary 
journeys.  The  year  of  his  birth  is  unknown,  but  it  cannot 
have  been  very  far  from  the  beginning  of  our  era,  for  before 
his  conversion  be  makes  his  appearance  in  public  in  a  way 
which  would  have  been  hardly  possible  for  a  Jew  of  less  than 

D 


34         AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  I. 

thirty  years  of  age  ;  his  mind  had  had  time  to  take  firm  root  in 
the  Kabbinical  theology  before  he  cast  aside  what  had  once 
seemed  so  precious  to  him  ;  while  after  60  A.D.  he  speaks  of 
himself  from  his  prison  as  '  Paul  the  aged.' l  The  fact  thai 
he  reckoned  himself  among  the  '  chief  apostles,'  also,  would 
be  best  explained  by  supposing  that  there  was  no  substantial 
difference  of  age  between  Jesus  and  himself,  and  that  he  was 
at  most  two  or  three  years  the  younger.  At  his  circumcision 
he  was  given  the  Jewish  name  of  Saul,  by  which  alone  he  is 
spoken  of  in  the  Acts  as  far  as  xiii.  9. ;  there,  however,  w 
learn  that  he  also  bore  the  name  of  Paul,  which  he  u 
exclusively  in  his  epistles.  There  is  nothing  in  the  Acts 
indicate  that  he  adopted  this  second  name  at  that  particula 
moment — possibly  in  order  to  symbolise  his  new  birth — an 
it  is  still  less  probable  that  his  meeting  with  Sergius  Paul 
the  Proconsul  of  Cyprus  was  the  occasion  of  the  chang 
Double  names  were  becoming  the  fashion  in  the  East  at  tha 
time,  and  it  was  especially  common  to  couple  a  Greek  with 
Semitic  name,  so  that  our  Apostle  might  very  well  have 
called  both  Saul  and  Paul  from  his  youth  up.  He  would  th 
have  left  it  to  the  changing  milieux  in  which  he  happened 
find  himself  to  call  him  by  whichever  name  they  found  most 
convenient ;  so  that  to  Greeks  he  would  always  have  been  Paul.2 
Paul  did  not  spring  by  any  means  from  the  lowest  class. 
His  whole  bearing  would  be  sufficient  to  show  this  ;  but  we 
also  have  evidence  that  his  family  possessed  the  Roman 
civitas  long  before  his  birth.  That  he  should  have  learnt  a 
trade — that  of  tent-maker  or  tanner  according  to  Acts  xviii.  3 
—is  no  objection  to  this  theory,  since  such  was  the  very 
general  custom  among  the  Jewish  scribes.  On  his  missionary 
journeys  it  is  clear  that  he  had  no  private  means  at  his 
disposal,  but  the  apostate  would  have  scorned  to  accept  any 
support  from  his  yet  unconverted  family.  No  doubt  he 
intended  to  become  a  Rabbi  and  with  this  view  betook  him- 
self when  still  quite  a  young  man  to  Jerusalem,  where  teachers 
as  distinguished  as  Gamaliel  the  Elder  were  at  that  time  to  be 
found.3  Here  he  remained  true  to  that  extreme  Pharisaism 

1   Philemon,  ver.  9. 

3  Cf.  Deissmann'a  Bibelstudien  (1895),  vol.  i.  pp.  181  fol.      s  Acts  xxii.  8. 


§  3.]  THE   APOSTLE    PAUL  35 

which  was  the  tradition  of  his  family  ;  he  could  not  be  strict 
enough  in  his  observance  of  the  Law,  and  he  looked  with 
burning  hatred,  ready  for  any  and  every  act  of  violence, 
upon  the  small  body  of  the  followers  of  Jesus  who  had 
so  rudely  attacked  the  Pharisaic  ideal  of  the  Messiah,  and 
therefore,  in  spite  of  their  attachment  to  the  Law,  could 
never  hope  to  be  tolerated  or  even  recognised  by  the  Pharisee 
pure  and  simple.  Jesus  himself  he  had  not  seen  (2.  Cor. 
v.  16  proves  nothing  whatever  either  way),  so  that  he 
probably  did  not  arrive  in  Jerusalem  until  after  his  death, 
but  the  persecution  and  extermination  of  his  followers  seemed 
to  Paul  a  worthy  task  to  which  to  devote  his  life.1  On  some 
such  errand  he  had  set  out  one  day  for  Damascus,2  when  the 
reaction  suddenly  and  irresistibly  came  upon  him.  He 
describes  the  occurrence  himself  as  a  direct  revelation  of 
Christ  vouchsafed  to  him  in  or  near  Damascus,  and  charging 
him  with  the  task  of  preaching  the  Gospel  to  the  Gentiles.3 
Of  course  this  vision  had  its  pyschological  preparation  within 
him  ;  instead  of  the  proud  self-satisfaction  of  the  average  Jew, 
which,  in  the  words  of  Philipp.  vii.  6,  could  bear  witness  to 
itself  '  as  touching  the  righteousness  which  is  in  the  Law, 
found  blameless,'  Paul  had  already  known  moments  when  he 
had  felt  all  the  bitter  pain  of  one  sold  unto  sin  and  condemned 
to  a  helpless  doing  of  evil  in  spite  of  all  his  love  for  good,  and 
had  cried  in  his  woe  *  Who  is  it  that  will  save  me  ? '  The  little 
he  had  heard  of  the  sayings  of  Jesus  had  long  since  made  an 
impression  upon  him,  and  the  courage  and  contempt  for 
death  that  he  had  witnessed  among  the  Christian  community 
had  already  begun  to  exercise  his  conscience.  It  was  now  only 
the  obstinacy  of  the  Pharisee,  determined  to  seek  salvation 
'  in  the  Law,'  through  his  own  merits,  that  still  combated  the 
(TKav§a\ov  of  the  Gospel  preached  by  these  innovators, 
and  this  precisely  because  such  a  man  would  naturally  be 
more  alive  than  they  to  the  logical  conclusions  of  their  faith. 
In  a  Paul  of  Tarsus  the  struggle  between  his  own  religious  ex- 
perience and  the  Jewish  tradition  could  have  but  one  ending — 
it  led  him  inevitably  to  the  vision  of  that  Jesus  whom  he  had 

1  Gal.  i.  13.  -  Acts  ix.  1-19. 

3  Gal.  i.  15-17 ;  1.  Cor.  xv.  8. 

D  2 


36         AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

striven  so  hard  to  believe  a  false  prophet  and  a  traitor, 
throned  in  heavenly  glory,  to  the  instant  acceptance  of  the 
Lord's  call  and  the  entrance  by  baptism  into  the  ranks  of  his 
disciples. 

The  narrative  of  these  events  in  the  Acts  l  is  of  a  some- 
what legendary  character,  as,  indeed,  is  the  case  with  nearly 
all  those  parts  of  the  book  that  bear  on  the  first  and  larger 
half  of  Paul's  missionary  life  ;  it  is  only  when  we  come  to  the 
later  part  that  we  find  it  drawing  from  trustworthy  sources. 
Here  we  may  rely  almost  without  exception  on  the  informa- 
tion it  gives  as  to  the  order  of  succession  of  the  chief  stations 
of  his  missionary  travels,  but  its  indications  of  time  are  less 
valuable  and  are  often  put  in  the  form  of  conjecture  by  the 
writer  himself.  Fortunately,  however,  we  may  learn  enougli 
from  the  actual  letters  of  the  Apostle  to  give  us  a  tolerably 
clear  idea  of  his  fortunes  after  his  conversion.  Immediately 
after  his  vision  (Gal.  i.  16  fol.)  he  went  into  Arabia,  returning 
some  time  later  to  Damascus  and  thence  after  three  years' 
absence  to  Jerusalem.  He  only  left  Damascus  under  com- 
pulsion, for  according  to  2.  Cor.  xi.  32  an  attempt  was  made 
on  his  life  by  the  Ethnarch  of  the  Arabian  King  Aretas 
— probably  prompted,  like  all  such  later  persecutions,  by  the 
inconvenient  zeal  he  displayed  in  his  enthusiasm  for  the  n< 
religion.  A  singular  hypothesis  has  been  put  forward,  bat 
on  the  '  immediately '  of  Gal.  i.  16  and  on  the  similarity  with 
which  Paul  describes  his  sojourn  in  Arabia  and  that  whicli 
took  place  afterwards  in  Syria,  that  he  spent  these  three  years 
in  solitude  in  the  Arabian  desert,  silently  meditating  upon  his 
experience  or  developing  undisturbed  his  peculiar  system  of 
doctrine— as  though  'Arabia'  were  mere  desert,  and  Paul's 
vocation  that  of  the  scientific  theologian  !  No,  a  definite  office 
had  been  laid  upon  him  in  his  vision,  and  Paul  was  not 
the  man  to  hesitate  an  instant  in  the  discharge  of  all  the 
duties  of  that  office,  while  it  need  not  surprise  us  that  he  did 
not  at  once  achieve  brilliant  successes  that  left  their  mark  on 
universal  history. 

When  he  found  the  country  east  of  the  Jordan  closed  to 
him  it  was  necessary  to  seek  some  other  field  of  enterprise, 

1  ix.  1-30. 


§3.]  TIIK    APOSTLE    PAUL  37 

and  what  more  natural  than  that  he  should  turn  to  his  own 
country    of    Syria   and    Cilicia?      He   merely    touched    at 
Jerusalem  on  his  way  thither,  and  himself  declares  that  his 
fortnight's  stay  in  the  city  was  of  a  purely  private  and  secret 
nature ;  he  wisely  contented  himself  while  there  with  visiting 
Peter  and  being  introduced  by  him  to  James  the  brother  of 
the   Lord.     In   any  case   the   words  of   Gal.   i.    18  and   22 
effectually  exclude  the  possibility  of  his  having  had  any  die- 
putes  at  this  time  with  the  '  Hellenists  '  of  the  Jewish  capital.1 
He  remained  in  the  new  scene  of  his  activity  for  fourteen 
years  -  and  doubtless  used  Antioch  as  his  base  of  operations, 
as  the  Primitive  Apostles  used  Jerusalem  ;   for  although  he 
may  not  have  been  the  actual  founder  of  the  Christian  com- 
munity  there — which  early   became  one  of   importance — he 
regarded  himself  at  least  as  the  representative  of  the  whole 
Gentile-Christianity  of  the  city.3     The  report  in  the  Acts4 
rests  no  doubt  on  good  authority  when  it  tells  us  that  Paul 
spent  a  considerable  time  at  Antioch  and  was  at  first  con- 
tinually going  back  to  it.     It  is  clear,  on  the  other  hand,  that 
he  did  not  confine  himself  to  preaching  in  this  one  city  for 
fourteen   years   continuously,  but  that  he   laboured  for   the 
Gospel  in  many  parts  of  Syria  and  Cilicia,  sometimes  alone 
and  sometimes  with  companions,  while  it  is  conceivable  that 
even  the  so-called  first  missionary  journey  to  Cyprus,  Pam- 
phylia,  Pisidia  and  Lycaonia5  may  have  fallen  within  this 
period.     It  is  true  that  in  the  Acts  this  journey  is  made  to 
follow  on  a  second  visit  of  the  converted  Paul  to  Jerusalem,6 
while  within  this  period  of  fourteen  years  Paul  certainly  did 
not  set  foot  within  the  borders  of   Judaea ;    but  this  would 
not  be  the  only  error  of  the  Acts  relating  to  that  period,  and, 
on  the  other  hand,  although  Paul  himself  only  mentions  his 
labours  in  Syria  and  Cilicia,  he  may  not  necessarily  have 
meant  to  exclude  an  occasional  excursion  into  neighbouring 
unconverted  countries.   Only  this  journey  of  Paul  and  Barnabas 
cannot  have  been  very  important  or  successful ;   otherwise 
Paul  would  certainly  have  mentioned  it  in  Gal.  i.  21. 

1  Acts  ix.  28  fol.  -  Gal.  ii.  1. 

3  Gal.  ii.  11  fol.  4  xiv.  28  ;  xv.  35  and  xviii.  22. 

5  Acts  xiii.  4-xiv.  26.  6  xi.  30,  xii.  25. 


38         AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

Seventeen  years  after  he  had  left  Jerusalem  as  the  deadly 
foe  of  the  Christian  community  there,  he  returned  to  make 
his  appearance  publicly  in  its  midst,  and  with  him  went  the 
Jewish  Christian  Barnabas  and  the  Gentile  Titus  whom  h( 
had  himself  converted  to  the  Gospel.  This  was  a  step  whicl 
he  would  not  even  yet  have  dared  to  take  on  his  owi 
responsibility,  but  its  necessity  had  been  revealed  to  him  in 
vision,  and  the  state  of  affairs  outside  his  own  Church 
demanded  a  settlement  which  Paul  could  only  hope  to  effect 
in  a  satisfactory  manner  by  personal  intercourse  with  th< 
universally  acknowledged  heads  of  the  new  sect.  According 
to  Gal.  ii.  2-5  Paul  was  in  danger  of  seeing  his  labour 
wasted  ;  there  were  certain  members  of  the  community,  whom 
Paul  can  only  describe  as  '  false  brethren  privily  brought  in,' 
who  disputed  the  truth  of  his  Gospel,  because  he  offered 
it  and  all  its  promises  without  stipulating  that  the  convei 
should  accept  the  Mosaic  Law  along  with  his  new  fait! 
and  because  he  did  not  even  insist  upon  the  circumcisioi 
of  the  converted  Gentile ;  thus,  since  they  appealed  to  tl 
authority  of  Jesus  himself  and  of  his  chosen  Twelve, 
must  doubtless  have  excited  considerable  distrust  of  Paul  an< 
his  programme  and  have  worked  against  him  both  direct!; 
and  indirectly.  But  Paul  was  certain  of  the  justice  of  hi* 
cause,  while  the  immediate  sense  of  his  divine  mission  1< 
him  additional  strength,  and  he  ventured  to  appeal  to  the 
Apostles  themselves  to  decide  the  quarrel :  that  is  to  say, 
recognise  his  rights  and  his  liberty.  It  was  a  very  judicioi 
move  of  his  to  take  with  him  his  fellow-worker  Barnabas,  whc 
had  long  been  respected  in  Jerusalem,  and  Titus,  the  most 
distinguished  of  the  Greeks  he  had  himself  converted ;  tl 
'  pillars  of  the  Church '  in  Jerusalem  should  see  and  he* 
this  uncircumcised  Christian,  should  learn  what  experience 
he  had  to  tell  and  listen  to  his  prophetic  words  ;  then  the; 
should  ask  themselves  whether  the  spirit  which  dwelt 
him  was  of  a  different  sort  from  theirs.  Paul's  expectation 
were  fulfilled,  for  although  there  may  have  been  a  good  dei 
of  sympathy  for  those  false  brethren  among  the  communi\ 
of  Jerusalem,  the  elders  received  Titus,  uncircumcised  as 
was,  into  the  Church,  acknowledged  the  supernatural  nature 


$  3.]  THE   APOSTLE    PAUL  39 

of  the  summons  that  made  Paul  the  Apostle  of  the  Gentiles, 
and  with  it  his  equality  with  Peter.  This  last  concession  was 
made  necessary,  in  spite  of  all  objections,  by  Paul's  success, 
which  could  only  be  the  work  of  God.  The  Jewish  world 
they  kept  for  themselves,  but  delivered  the  Gentiles  over  to 
Paul,  and  the  seal  was  set  upon  the  perfect  harmony  thus 
established,  by  Paul's  promise  to  collect  money  among  the 
converted  Gentiles  for  the  suffering  Church  at  Jerusalem. 
Paul  probably  proposed  this  task  himself,  for  his  attitude 
towards  the  leaders  of  the  Primitive  Church  would  be  much 
more  happily  attested  by  such  a  collection  than  by  any 
written  recommendations,  which  he  would  have  been  too 
proud  to  accept  or  to  use.  It  is  impossible  to  be  on  bad 
terms  with  or  to  despise  the  man  from  whom  one  accepts 
a  favour,  and,  the  conditions  being  what  they  were,  love 
and  mutual  esteem  must  clearly  have  existed  between  giver 
and  receiver. 

There  was  now  nothing  to  detain  Paul  longer  in  Jerusalem, 
and  he  returned  to  take  up  his  interrupted  task  at  Antioch  in 
the  old  way.  A  visit  from  Peter,  which  took  place  soon  after 
this,  must  have  given  him  much  pleasure  by  proving  to  the 
world  the  keen  interest  taken  by  the  greatest  of  the  Primitive 
Apostles  in  the  welfare  of  the  Gentile  communities,  and  a 
friendly  understanding  among  all  the  Christians  of  Antioch 
was  promoted  by  it.  But  Peter  was  soon  followed  by '  certain 
men  from  James,'  who  protested  against  his  eating  with  the 
uncircumcised  as  a  breach  of  the  Mosaic  Law,  and  he  and  all 
the  other  Jewish  Christians  at  Antioch,  with  the  exception  of 
Paul,  were  prevailed  upon  to  abandon  this  custom  of  fellow- 
ship at  meals,  although  till  now  no  objection  had  been  raised 
against  it.  Paul,  however,  regarded  this  change  not  only  as 
a  mere  temporary  compromise  based  on  purely  artificial 
grounds,  but  as  a  treacherous  misinterpretation  of  the  true 
Gospel,  and  at  a  meeting  of  the  community  when  all  the 
faithful,  including  the  envoys  of  James,  were  present,  he 
accused  his  fellow-Apostle  in  the  bitterest  terms  of  pusill- 
animity and  even  of  treachery  to  the  faith.1 

What  the  sequel  was  to  this  painful  dispute  we  do  not  learn, 

1  Gal.  ii.  11-21. 


40         AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

but  we  should  have  no  justification  for  asserting  that  it  re- 
sulted in  a  definite  breach  between  the  parties  concerned. 
Even  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians  Paul  speaks  of  Barnabas 
and  Peter  in  far  too  friendly  a  way  to  leave  room  for  the 
supposition  that  a  dissolution  of  the  agreement  described  in 
ii.  8,  10  was  contemplated  on  the  ground  of  this  one  serious 
difference.  Paul  does  not  relate  the  occurrence  for  the  pur- 
pose of  prejudicing  his  readers  against  Peter  or  of  lowering 
him  in  their  eyes,  but  simply  to  illustrate  in  the  most  striking 
way  his  own  unchanging  steadfastness  and  independence  at 
a  critical  juncture.  But  it  is  easy  to  imagine  that  after  these 
disputes  he  longed  to  turn  his  back  upon  Antioch  and  the 
neighbourhood  where  he  and  Barnabas  had  hitherto  worked 
together,  and  that  he  began  to  seek  some  new  field  for  his 
labours  in  distant  lands.  The  statement  in  Acts  xv.  40  fol., 
that  Paul  set  out  in  company  with  one  Silas  (=  Silvanus) 
but  without  Barnabas,  is  very  probably  correct ;  he  first  went 
through  Syria  and  Cilicia  '  confirming  the  churches '  and 
doubtless  encouraging  them  to  resist  Judaistic  demands  ; 
and  then,  as  a  result  of  the  visit  of  the  Lycaonian  and 
Jrisidian  brethren,  he  succeeded  in  gaining  another  travelling 
companion  in  the  person  of  Timothy,  so  that  with  these  two 
he  could  now  set  out  on  his  great  northward  and  north- 
westward journey  through  Galatia  and  Phrygia  to  the  Troad, 
and  even,  contrary  to  his  expectation,  to  Macedonia  and 
Achaia.  The  incidents  of  these  travels  can  best  be  ascer- 
tained by  referring  to  the  Epistles  Paul  wrote  at  the  time. 
According  to  Acts  xviii.  18-23  he  journeyed  from  the  capital 
of  Achaia  via  Caesarea  (in  Palestine)  and  possibly  Jeru- 
salem (?)  back  to  Antioch,  but  soon  afterwards  started  on  a 
second  journey,  of  which  the  ultimate  goal  was  Ephesus. 

Hence  we  are  accustomed  to  distinguish  three  missionary 
journeys ;  but  in  reality  this  merely  encourages  the  false 
impression  that  Paul  began  his  missionary  career  with 
the  events  of  Acts  xiii. ;  it  is  more  practical  to  distinguish 
his  spheres  of  work,  thus  ;  Arabia  with  Damascus  for  three 
years  ;  Syria  and  the  neighbouring  districts  for  fourteen  years 
(or  fifteen  if  we  consider  the  Cyprian  voyage  to  have  taken 
place  after  the  assembly  in  Jerusalem) ;  then  after  the  dispute 


§  3.]  THE   APOSTLE    PAUL  41 

with  Peter,  Galatia,  Macedonia  and  Achaia  (including  Corinth) 
for  three  years,  and  finally  Asia  for  over  two  and  a  quarter, 
according  to  Acts  xix.  8  and  10,  or  for  three  full  years 
according  to  xx.  31.  The  visits  to  Macedonia  and  Achaia 
included  in  this  last  period  do  not  form  a  missionary  journey 
in  the  strictest  sense  ;  Paul's  gaze  was  now  directed  further 
westwards,  towards  Rome  and  Spain,  and  his  intention  rather 
was  to  take  leave  of  his  Greek  communities,  and  merely  to 
appear  once  more  in  Jerusalem  with  the  fruits  of  a  collection 
made  during  several  years  by  the  Greeks  for  their  poorer 
brethren  in  that  city.  His  arrival  at  Jerusalem  for  a  feast 
of  Pentecost  probably  took  place  one  year  after  his  departure 
from  Ephesus.  Here  the  heaviest  blow  of  all  was  dealt 
him  ;  at  the  demand  of  the  Jews  he  was  immediately  taken 
prisoner  and  transported  to  Csesarea ;  there,  however,  he 
was  not  definitely  condemned,  because  he  lodged  an  appeal 
to  the  Emperor,  but  after  a  tedious  delay,  lasting  two 
years  according  to  the  Acts,  was  sent  by  order  of  the  Pro- 
curator Festus  to  Eome  by  sea.  His  departure  took  place 
in  early  autumn,  and  owing  to  a  shipwreck  which  compelled 
him  to  spend  the  winter  in  Malta  he  did  not  arrive  in 
Rome  until  the  spring  of  the  next  year.  The  last  words  of 
the  Acts  concerning  him  are  that  he  lived  there  for  two  years 
longer,  under  military  supervision,  but  otherwise  unhindered 
in  his  labours  for  the  Gospel. 

With  this  the  relative  chronology  of  Paul's  life  is 
established  with  tolerable  certainty.  A  period  of  seventeen 
years  is  required  from  his  conversion  to  the  so-called 
Apostolic  Council  of  Acts  xv.  and  Galatians  ii.,  and  another 
of  ten  or  eleven  years  from  that  point  to  the  last  words 
of  the  Acts.  But  the  task  of  assigning  this  chain  of  events 
to  its  place  in  general  chronology  is  none  the  less  difficult. 
As  yet  we  know  of  only  two  fixed  landmarks  by  which  to 
guide  ourselves  :  (a)  King  Aretas  died  in  the  year  40  A.D. 
at  latest,  so  that  Paul's  flight  from  Damascus,  which  was 
caused  by  his  ethnarch,  could  not  have  taken  place  later 
than  that  year ;  thus  37  A.D.  is  the  terminus  ad  quern  for  his 
conversion.  (6)  In  the  summer  of  62  the  successor  of  Festus, 
one  Albinus,  was  already  at  work  in  Judaea,  so  that  Paul's 


4:2         AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

despatch  as  a  prisoner  to  Rome  cannot  be  dated  later  than 
the  autumn  of  the  year  61.  It  cannot,  however,  be  placed 
much  earlier,  for  Festus  did  not  hold  his  office  long,  so  that, 
ceteris  paribus,  the  autumn  of  the  year  60  would  perhaps 
be  the  most  probable  date  for  Paul's  departure  from  Caesarea 
towards  Kome.  By  calculating  back  from  this  point  accord- 
ing to  the  dates  given  in  the  Acts — of  which  none  but  the 
two  years  for  the  Caesarean  imprisonment  are  open  to  doubt 
we  are  able  to  fix  the  Apostolic  Council  at  or  near  the  ye 
52  and  the  conversion  of  Paul  at  the  year  35.  No  objectio: 
can  be  raised  against  this  last,  for  if  Jesus  was  crucified 
A.D.  29  or  30,  five  years  would  be  amply  sufficient  to  account 
for  the  development  of  a  Messianic  community  into  an 
abomination  in  the  eyes  of  strict  Pharisaism,  and  also  for  the 
corresponding  development  which  changed  Paul  from  a  silent 
member  of  the  school  of  Gamaliel  into  a  furious  persecutor 
though  one  who  already  belonged  at  heart  to  the  persecu 
— of  the  community  at  Damascus.  His  execution  at  Eome 
the  time  of  Nero — a  tradition  which  no  one  cares  to  dispute 
would  then  fall  in  the  year  63,  and  would  have  no  connectio 
as  we  are  so  prone  to  assume,  with  the  so-called  Neroni 
persecution  of  the  summer  of  64.  But  in  any  case  we  sho 
find  it  difficult  to  believe  that  Paul  was  ever  suspected 
incendiarism ;  while,  when  we  take  Nero's  character  and  t 
state  of  things  in  Rome  at  that  time  into  account,  a  sudd 
and  fatal  turn  in  the  Apostle's  trial,  unexpected  even  by  him 
self,  would  need  no  special  explanation  such  as  the  unwon 
agitation  produced  by  the  fire  of  Rome. 

In  recent  times  great  popularity  has  been  won  by  t 
hypothesis  (which  indeed  is  not  a  new  one)  that  Paul  w 
released  at  the  end  of  the  two  years  mentioned  in  Ac 
xxviii.  30,  and  that  he  set  out  on  his  travels  once  mo 
visiting  Spain  and  also  his  old  communities  in  the  East,  b 
that  he  was  then  again  thrown  into  prison,  and  this  ti 
executed.  Thus  Zahn  assumes  that  Paul  left  Rome  in  the 
autumn  of  the  year  63,  returned  to  it  in  the  spring  of  66  and 
was  executed  either  at  the  end  of  that  year  or  at  the  beginning 
of  the  next.  Harnack  finds  room  for  this  mysterious  four 
journey  between  59  and  63.  Nothing,  however,  speaks 


i 


§  3.]  THi;    APOSTLE    PAUL  43 

favour  of  such  an  hypothesis  except  the  interested  but  vain 
desire  of  apologists  to  save  the  Pastoral  Epistles ;  the  passage 
in  the  first  Epistle  of  Clement l  in  which  the  martyrdom  of 
Paul  is  mentioned  in  distinct  terms  (after  that  of  Peter,  to 
which,  however,  the  reference  is  not  quite  so  plain),  gives  us 
rather  the  impression  that  the  victims  of  the  persecution  in 
question  suffered  later  than  Peter  and  Paul,  for  if  the  writer 
had  known  that  Paul  was  martyred  in  67  and  the  supposed 
incendiaries  as  early  as  64,  would  he  have  passed  on  from 
the  subject  of  Peter  and  Paul  to  speak  of  them  with  the 
words,  '  To  these  men  [Peter  and  Paul],  who  walked  in  such 
holy  wise,  was  joined  (avvrjOpoio-Brj)  a  great  host  of  the  elect, 
who  .  .  .  have  become  a  glorious  ensample  unto  us '  ?  We 
may  search  the  whole  of  the  Acts  in  vain  for  any  indication 
that  Paul  was  but  temporarily  debarred  from  his  work; 
indeed  the  farewell  discourse  at  Miletus  points  in  the  clearest 
terms  to  the  very  opposite  conclusion.  Nor  can  I  detect 
in  vv.  xxviii.  30  fol.  any  reference  whatever  to  a  subse- 
quent release  of  the  Apostle;  the  words,  'he  taught,  no 
man  forbidding  him,'  are  surely  meant  in  silent  contrast  to 
the  implied  sequel,  that  he  was  forbidden,  and  if  Paul  had 
taken  up  his  teaching  again  afterwards  in  the  old  way  the 
writer  could  hardly  have  kept  silence  on  the  subject.  The 
rash  idea,  moreover,  that  Luke  was  keeping  back  this  last 
period  of  the  labours  of  Paul,  together  with  the  story  of 
his  glorious  martyrdom,  to  form  the  material  for  a  third  book 
equal  in  bulk  to  the  Gospel  and  the  Acts,  is  destroyed  by 
the  reflection  that  even  if  he  meant  to  include  some  of  the 
doings  of  Peter,  Matthias  and  Thomas,  his  material  cannot 
have  been  sufficient.  Simple-minded  readers  have  construed 
a  journey  to  Spain  out  of  Eomans  xv.  28,  without  making 
the  slightest  effort  to  find  a  place  for  it  in  Paul's  life; 
others  with  equal  justice  have  discovered  a  reference  in 
Philippians  i.  25  and  ii.  24  to  his  release  after  the  first 
Eoman  imprisonment ;  but  the  Acts  know  nothing  of  this  so- 
called  '  primitive  tradition.'  With  great  tact  the  book  breaks 
off  at  the  last  point  at  which  the  labours  of  the  hero- 
Apostle  for  the  Kingdom  of  God  can  be  described — at  the 

1  Ch.  v.  fol. 


he 
lis 

s 

u~ 


44         AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

moment  when  he  has  succeeded  in  proclaiming  the  Word  of 
the  Cross  in  the  West,  at  the  very  steps  of  the  imperial 
throne, — and  the  writer  refrains  from  relating  the  tragic 
ending  of  Paul's  life  because  it  was  not  his  desire  to  write  a 
biography  of  Paul,  but  to  describe  the  triumphal  march  of 
the  Gospel  under  the  leadership  of  the  Apostles.  In  his 
eyes  the  *  Acts  of  the  Apostles '  came  to  an  end  with  the  last 
day  on  which  Paul  could  preach  the  Lord  Jesus  fully  and 
frankly,  '  no  man  forbidding  him.' 

2.  With  this  rapid  sketch  of  the  Apostle's  life  we  have 
not  yet  attained  the  most  important  materials  for  a  realisa- 
tion of  his  personality.  This  would  require  above  all  that 
we  should  absorb  ourselves  in  his  world  of  thought,  in  the 
grandeur  of  his  peculiar  religious  convictions,  and  in  his 
conception  of  the  Gospel, — a  task  which  must  be  left 
another  branch  of  the  subject,  New  Testament  theology, 
discharge.  But  too  much  stress  cannot  be  laid  upon  the 
fact  that  Paul  was  in  no  sense  of  the  words  a  theologian  or  a 
dogmatist.  Many  of  the  errors  of  criticism — even  of  the  most 
modern — arise  from  the  habit  of  calling  attention  tt  supposed 
contradictions  in  the  different  Epistles,  which  Paul,  it  is 
thought,  would  never  have  made,  or  of  seeking  ftr  a  hare 
and  fast  line  of  development  for  his  religious  views,  arrang- 
ing the  Epistles  according  to  it,  and  rejecting  everything 
which  does  not  fit  in  with  the  arrangement.  Paul  was  far 
too  great  a  genius  not  to  have  room  in  his  mind  for  ideas  that 
differed  very  widely.  Things  Jewish  and  things  anti-Jewish 
were  almost  evenly  balanced  in  his  thoughts  and  in  his 
temperament,  while  he  himself  never  observed  the  antagon- 
ism between  them.  This  alone  would  necessitate  a  certain 
oscillation  in  his  mind  between  free  speculation  and  Kab- 
binical  logic ;  but  he  never  regarded  himself  as  having 
nothing  more  to  learn  ;  rather  he  was  always  open  by  his 
very  nature  to  new  and  higher  knowledge,  troubling  himself 
little  about  the  stages  by  which  it  was  attained.  His  cry  to 
the  Philippians  }  :  *  If  in  anything  ye  are  otherwise  minded, 
even  this  shall  God  reveal  unto  you :  only,  whereunto  we 
have  already  attained,  by  that  same  rule  let  us  walk 

1  iii.  15  fol. 


§  3.]  THE    APOSTLE    PAUL  45 

applied  with  at  least  equal  force  to  himself.  Nor  must  we 
forget  that  in  his  case  even  the  knowledge  which  was  absolute 
and  incontestable  might  often  be  expressed  in  the  most  varied 
forms,  according  to  his  mood  at  the  time,  his  adversaries,  or 
the  circumstances  of  the  case. 

But  the  fact  remains  that  Paul  has  a  right  to  be  called 
the  Apostle  KCL-T  ego^'iv,  the  disciple  who  raised  the  Messianic 
faith,  hitherto  but  the  creed  of  a  Jewish  sect,  to  the  position 
of  a  world-religion.  Immense  as  were  the  inward  difficulties 
he  had  to  overcome  at  first — and  not  only,  it  seems,  before 
his  conversion — those  which  he  encountered  all  his  life  from 
the  outside  world  during  the  execution  of  his  work  can 
hardly  have  been  less.  The  words  of  2.  Cor.  xi.  23-29  show 
clearly  enough  how  incomplete  is  the  picture  given  in  the 
Acts  of  his  struggles  and  his  heroism  ;  every  step  that  he 
took  was  won  at  the  risk  of  his  life,  in  the  face  of  the  hatred 
of  Jews  and  fanatical  Jewish  Christians  and  of  the  contempt 
of  the  Gentiles  ;  there  was  no  indignity,  no  suffering,  no  mis- 
fortune that  he  was  not  forced  to  bear.  Untiring  in  his 
labours  as  a  preacher,  he  earned  his  livelihood  by  bodily  toil, 
often  at  night,1  and  but  rarely  accepted  presents  even  from 
his  most  faithful  followers.2  At  the  same  time  his  health 
was  by  no  means  sound  ;  the  'infirmity  of  the  flesh '  of  Gal. 
iv.  13  can  scarcely  have  been  a  mere  passing  trouble,  and  in 
•2.  Cor.  iv.  7-12  he  dwells  at  length  upon  the  '  dying  '  which 
he  '  bears  about  in  the  body.'  Moreover  the  '  thorn  in  the 
flesh  '  of  2.  Cor.  xii.  7-9  has  given  rise  to  the  very  probable 
suggestion  that  after  his  conversion  he  became  an  epileptic — 
a  fact  assuredly  not  unconnected  with  that  highly  strung 
religious  temperament  which  was  continually  manifesting 
itself  in  '  visions  '  and  l  revelations.'  He  remained  unmarried, 
and  never  enjoyed  the  happiness  of  family  life ; 3  his  duties 
were  all  towards  Christ  and  the  Gospel,  and  rival  duties 
towards  man  he  could  not  undertake.  It  is  true  that  through 
his  Epistles  we  come  to  know  of  a  whole  host  of  helpers 
who  willingly  obeyed  their  master's  orders,  but  even  in  later 
years  he  experienced  disappointments  4  like  those  caused  him 

1  1.  Thess.  ii.  9.  2  2.  Cor.  xi.  8  fol. ;  Philip,  iv.  15. 

3  1.  Cor.  vii.  7,  ix.  5.  4  Cf.  Philip,  ii.  20  fol. 


46          AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  j. 

at  an  earlier  date  by  John  Mark  and  Barnabas.1  And  that 
he  was  the  one  guiding  spirit  of  the  band  is  abundantly 
shown  by  the  fact  that  not  a  trace  can  be  found  of  any 
systematic  continuation  of  his  life's  work  by  any  one  of  these 
disciples  after  he  himself  had  passed  away. 

How,  then,  can  we  explain  the  unexampled  success— 
as  compared  with  that  of  other  Apostles — which  attended 
the  preaching  of  this  sickly,  insignificant-looking  man? 
How  did  he  manage  to  win  this  multitude  of  followers  for 
a  Gospel  so  foreign  to  the  Greek  genius,  and  in  a  world  so 
strange  to  him  ?  And,  once  won,  how  did  he  succeed  in 
holding  it  together  in  such  firmly-knit  communities  ?  The 
phrase  '  because  the  time  was  fulfilled '  is  scarcely  a  sufficient 
answer  to  the  question,  and  the  appeal  '  to  the  strength  of 
God  made  perfect  in  weakness '  is  but  an  evasion  of  the 
point  at  issue.  Certainly  it  was  not  by  his  learning  that 
Paul  made  his  impression— the  few  quotations  from  Greek 
literature  that  may  be  found  in  his  Epistles 2  scarcely  point 
to  an  original  acquaintance  with  the  classics.  They  might 
easily  have  remained  in  his  memory  from  his  school  days, 
or  he  might  have  acquired  them  by  mere  intercourse  with 
men  of  general  cultivation.  Nor  can  he  have  excelled  in 
eloquence,  for  his  enemies  readily  assert — though  only  in 
reference  to  one  of  his  defeats — that  his  speech  was  '  con- 
temptible.' 3  He  probably  spoke  as  he  wrote,  for  he  used  to  dic- 
tate his  Epistles  and  certainly  never  troubled  to  polish  them,  or 
to  spend  time  upon  the  elegance  of  their  style.  We  may,  in 
fact,  form  our  idea  of  his  manner  of  speech  from  these  Epistles. 
But  of  course  his  missionary  preaching,  and  the  Epistles  that 
have  come  down  to  us,  cannot  have  been  much  alike  in  their 
contents.  He  would  naturally  have  expressed  himself  other- 
wise in  addressing  a  Christian  community  than  in  speaking  to 
an  audience  of  Gentiles  who  had  never  heard  the  name  of  Christ 
before,4  and  to  whom  he  had  first  to  explain  the  fundamental 
religious  ideas  of  repentance,  of  faith  in  the  one  true  God,  of 
the  Kesurrection  and  the  Day  of  Judgment.  The  discourses 
which  the  Acts  put  into  his  mouth  on  such  occasions  con- 

1  Acts  xiii.  13  and  xv.  35  fol.  J  1.  Cor.  xv.  33. 

8  2.  Cor.  x.  10.  <  1.  Thess.  i.  9  and  10. 


§  3.]  THE   APOSTLE    PAUL  47 

tain  much  that  he  must  undoubtedly  have  made  use  of,  but 
they   are  at  all   events  but  attempts   on   the   part  of   the 
author  to  indicate  the  way  in  which  the  Apostle  might  have 
set  about  his  task,  and  we  should  decline  to  put  much  faith 
in  them,  if   for   no  other  reason  than  that   we  are  told  in 
the  Acts  that  Paul  used  always  to  preach  in  the  synagogues 
first,  and  only  turned  to  the  Gentiles  when  Israel  repulsed 
him  — a   statement  which  in   the  face  of   Gal.   i.    16,  ii.  2, 
5   and   9,   and   1.   Thess.  is   quite  untenable.      Nor    would 
a  man  of  Paul's  stamp  ever  have  acted  so  rigidly  according  to 
programme.     He  seized  his  openings  wherever  he  happened 
to  find  them,  making  use  of  such  fellow-labourers  or  fellow- 
travellers  as  chance  threw  in  his  way,  or  starting  from  the 
house  of  some  friend  who  had  perhaps  offered  him  hospitality 
on  the  recommendation  of  a  relation  at  home ;  but  besides  such 
means  as  these  he  can  never  have  shrunk  from  appearing 
openly  in  the  streets  or  at  popular  gatherings,  or  from  visiting 
the  synagogues  whenever  the  slightest  chance  of  success  pre- 
sented itself,  so  as  to  sow  the  seed  among  his  own  compatriots. 
Without  all  these    varied  attempts  he  would   not   so   often 
have  come  into  conflict  with  the  authorities.    Then  as  soon  as  a 
convert  was  won  at  any  place,  fresh  hearers  would  be  brought 
in  by  him  from  among  his  own  acquaintance,  and  thus  some 
communities  must  have  grown  with  great  rapidity  from  the 
very  beginning.     The  curiosity  of  the  Greeks  and  their  search 
after  something  especially  to  satisfy  the  religious   needs  of 
the  average  man,  whom  no  philosophy  could  help,  was  of 
use  in  procuring  him  an  attentive  hearing,  while  the  mag- 
nificent  promises  that  he  brought  with  him  won  over  the 
class  of  men  to  whom  but  little  of  Paul's  message  could  be 
brought  home  beyond  a  few  historical  facts  and  the  hopes  it 
held  out  for  the  future. 

Meanwhile  whether  our  Apostle  possessed  in  any  very  high 
degree  the  gifts  of  ruling  men  and  of  reading  their  hearts 
appears  doubtful  from  the  Epistles  to  the  Corinthians  ;  he 
judged  everything  and  everybody  according  to  his  own 
standard,  nor  was  his  ideal  of  '  Christ  all  in  all '  favourable  to 
a  tender  consideration  of  individual  peculiarities.  It  could  not 
have  been  easy,  moreover,  for  one  who  could  never  be  false  to 


48         AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

the  Jewish  theologian  within  him,  to  identify  himself  with  the 
Greek  point  of  view,  or  even  to  recognise  any  justification  f 
a  conception  of  the  world  so  different  from  his  own. 
was  perhaps  always  too  ready  to  yield  to  his  so-call 
'  visions,'  especially  in  shaping  his  plan  of  operations,1 
that  the  charge  of  vacillation  was  not  only  raised  against  hi 
but  appears  to  have  had  some  foundation.  The  passion  that 
drove  him  to  such  questionable  utterances  against  Jews  and 
Judaists  as  those  of  Gal.  v.  12  or  Philip,  iii.  2 — which  led  him 
to  pronounce  the  sharpest  judgment  of  all — '  for  they  all  seek 
their  own'— against  friends  who,  perhaps  for  very  good  reasons, 
had  for  once  not  obeyed  his  call 2 — must  undoubtedly  have 
led  him  into  indiscretions  of  speech  in  his  intercourse  with 
obstinate  Gentiles ;  but  he  possessed  dogged  courage,  un- 
swerving faith  in  his  subject  and  his  calling,  a  passion  for 
self-sacrifice  however  great,  the  ever  infectious  zeal  of  the 
enthusiast,  wonderful  animation  and  warmth  of  speech,  and 
finally  that  touching  tenderness  of  feeling  shown  in  Philip,  iv. 
10,  20 — qualities  compared  with  which  a  few  deficiencies  of 
manner  hardly  weigh  in  the  scale,  and  which  could  not  fail 
to  lay  all  the  best  of  his  converts,  once  gained,  under  the 
lasting  spell  of  his  influence. 

3.  A  writer  in  the  strictest  sense  Paul  did  not  profess  to 
be,  nor  is  there  any  need  to  discuss  the  question  whether  he 
was  specially  qualified  to  be  one  or  not.  But  he  has  left 
us  some  letters,  addressed  to  fellow-believers,  whether  indi- 
viduals or  whole  communities.  They  are  his  letters,  even 
where  the  superscription  tells  us  that  one  or  more  com- 
panions were  writing  with  him ;  for  the  continual  oscillation 
between  *  I '  and  '  we  ' — which,  by  the  way,  is  certainly  not 
due  to  chance  alone — shows  that  the  responsibility  for  the 
contents  rests  only  upon  him.  As  he  had  had  no  sharers 
in  the  work  of  founding  his  communities,  so  he  had  no 
collaborators  in  writing  his  Epistles.  These  Epistles,  however, 
in  spite  of  the  fact  that  they  are  always  intended  as  writings 
of  the  moment  addressed  to  a  narrow  circle  of  readers, 
yet  approach  much  more  nearly  to  the  position  of  inde- 
pendent literary  works  than  the  average  letters  of  great  men 

1  2.  Cor.  i.  15  fol. ;  Acts  xvi.  7.  lip.  ii.  21. 


$  3.]  THE   APOSTLE   PAUL  49 

in  modern  times.  For  it  is  characteristic  of  Paul's  writings 
that  he  can  never  confine  himself  to  the  narrow  and  indi- 
vidual aspect  of  a  thing ;  unconsciously  he  will  lift  the 
smallest  question  into  a  higher  sphere  and  place  it  on  a 
wider  basis :  take  his  instruction  to  the  Corinthians  on 
*  spiritual  gifts  '  and  their  different  values,  for  instance,  and 
see  to  what  a  lofty  level  he  raises  it  by  the  sudden  insertion 
of  the  hymn  to  love  !  Again,  he  likes  to  be  certain  of  his 
ground  before  he  decides  a  point,  and  his  arguments  habitu- 
ally lead  down  deeper  and  deeper  into  the  very  foundations 
of  his  faith. 

The  Epistle  to  the  Eomans  is  in  its  main  features  written 
according  to  a  scheme  already  well  thought  out ;  and  the 
digressions  with  which  in  2.  Corinthians  iii.-v.  Paul  surrounds 
his  tolerably  simple  theme — that  he  is  not  ashamed  of  his 
weakness  and  has  no  need  to  defend  himself— reveal  a  height 
of  art  which  in  anyone  else  would  suggest  conscious  skill.  No 
later  doctor  of  the  Church,  not  even  excepting  Tertullian 
and  Augustine,  ever  delivered  himself,  in  thirty  pages,  of 
thoughts  so  abundant,  so  bold  and  so  profound  as  those  Paul 
sets  forth  here  in  three ;  while  the  loftiness  of  tone  which  he 
displays  prohibits  any  idea  that  he  was  merely  jotting  down 
a  hasty  answer  to  a  letter  received  from  the  community — a 
message  on  paper.  Paul  was  fully  conscious  of  the  duty  laid 
upon  him,  even  in  absence,  to  share  with  his  communities  the 
best  of  that  spiritual  grace  which  had  been  vouchsafed  to  him. 
Thus,  without  knowing  or  intending  it,  Paul  became  by  his 
letters  the  creator  of  a  Christian  literature.  It  has  indeed  been 
asserted  that  he  was  already  familiar  with  some  writings  of 
Christian  origin,  but  this  cannot  be  proved.  As  to  older  usage, 
he  follows  it  so  far  as  to  begin  his  letters  with  an  address  in 
which  the  names  of  writer  and  recipient  are  conjoined  in 
a  salutation,  and  to  end  them  with  good  wishes;  but  the 
numerous  additions  in  the  address  to  the  names  of  both 
sender  and  recipient  at  once  betray  their  Christian  origin, 
while  the  words  of  greeting  themselves  are  especially  Christian 
in  form  (xapis  v^iv,  etc.,  for  xaipsiv,  %aLp£Ts  and  the  like). 

More  important,  however,  is  the  fact — which  we  can  only 
perceive  through  his  Epistles — that  Paul  created  a  new 


50         AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

language  for  the  new  religion.  Of  course  he  understood  the 
Hebrew  that  was  spoken  at  that  time  in  the  schools  of 
Jerusalem,  but  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  Greek  must  have 
been  much  more  natural  to  a  man  who  studied  the  Old 
Testament  almost  exclusively  in  the  Greek  translation,  or 
Septuagint ;  and  the  hypothesis  that  his  writings  were  trans- 
lated into  Greek  from  a  first  draft  in  Aramaic  is  almost  as 
romantic  as  the  suggestion  that  on  his  missionary  travels  he 
was  only  able  to  communicate  with  the  Gentiles  by  means  of 
an  interpreter.  He  was,  on  the  contrary,  fully  master  of  the 
language,  not  indeed  of  the  Greek  of  the  Classical  period,  but 
of  the  colloquial  '  Hellenistic  '  (97  /auz/rj),  into  which  he  had  also 
infused  a  strong  Hebrew  element  arising  from  his  education 
and  his  study  of  the  Septuagint.  But  he  was  not  satisfied 
with  the  materials  furnished  by  these  two  sources ;  wherever 
it  seemed  necessary  he  had  the  courage  to  coin  new  words 
and  phrases — aicaipslo-Qai,  for  instance,  in  Philip,  iv.  10,  and 
the  expression  h  Xpto-rw  slvat — and  to  words  long  in  existence 
he  sometimes  gave  a  new  meaning.  His  writings  are  not 
equalled  in  point  of  vocabulary  by  any  part  of  the  Septuagint, 
and  even  within  the  New  Testament  he  is  superior  to  all  in 
the  wealth  and  variety  of  his  expressions  and  his  boldness 
in  using  them.  But  his  style  is  neither  smooth,  elegant  nor 
correct,  and  he  himself  never  considered  that  he  excelled  in 
the  art  of  writing.1  He  pays  little  attention  to  euphony  or 
to  the  artistic  construction  and  rounding-off  of  his  periods  ; 
the  words  O-VVKOLVWVOS  rijs  P^s  rrjs  ITLOT^TOS  TTJS  s\aLas,  for 
instance,  of  Eom.  xi.  17  are  oratorically  ugly,  as  well  as  the 
thrice  repeated  Iv  vytiv  of  1.  Cor.  xi.  18  and  19  and  the  EV 
jravTi  beside  sv  nracn  of  2.  Cor.  xi.  6.  The  passage  beginning 
at  Eom.  ii.  18  is  overburdened  with  synonymous  expressions ; 
nor  does  his  tendency  towards  pleonasms  reveal  itself  only  in 
the  later  Epistles ;  yap  is  repeated  four  times  in  quick  succession 
in  the  short  sentences  of  Rom.  ii.  11-14,-  and  Bs  seven  times 
in  1.  Cor.  vii.  6-12  and  xiv.  4'-6".  The  periods  in  Philip, 
iii.  20  fol.,  iii.  7-11,  ii.  5-11  and  i.  27-30,  also,  are  halting 
and  confused. 

In  a  letter  wholly  devoid  of  punctuation,  many  of  the 
Apostle's  words  must  have  been  unintelligible,  although  in 

1  2.  Cor.  xi.  6.  -  Cf.  1.  Cor.  xi.  18-23. 


§  3.]  THE   APOSTLE    PAUL  51 

dictating  he  might  have  made  them  quite  clear  to  his  secre- 
tary through  accentuation  and  gesture  ;  unintentionally,  too, 
a  few  difficult  anacolutha  arose,  and  even  in  the  Epistle  to 
the  Komans  it  may  easily  be  seen  that  Paul  never  kept 
to  any  carefully  thought-out  arrangement  of  his  sentences, 
but  put  down  whatever  the  inspiration  of  the  moment 
suggested  to  him.  His  chain  of  thought  is  often  disconnected, 
his  conclusions — even  apart  from  the  groundless  character  of 
his  exegetic  method — not  above  reproach ;  similes  and 
allegories  miss  the  mark  because  the  general  conception  is 
faulty,  and  the  complaint  of  2.  Pet.  iii.  16  that  in  the  Epistles 
of  Paul  are  '  some  things  hard  to  be  understood '  is  not 
without  justice.  Certainly  they  are  not  easy  reading  with 
their  throng  of  hurrying  thoughts,  their  tersely  expressed 
ideas,  sometimes  no  more  than  indicated,  their  passages  of 
dialectic  demanding  the  strictest  attention  beside  stirring 
outbursts  of  stormy  passion.  Nevertheless  Paul  must  be 
ranked  as  a  great  master  of  language,  for  his  words  are  never 
forced  or  artificial,  but  always  suit  his  subject  and  his  mood, 
whether  he  is  advising,  exhorting,  threatening,  rebuking  or 
consoling.  Unconsciously  he  makes  use  of  the  tricks  of 
popular  speech  with  the  greatest  effect,  sometimes  of  striking 
metaphors,'  or  of  short  and  compressed  word-pictures,2  of 
rhetorical  questions  3  and  of  effective  anaphorae,1  and  even 
groups  of  antitheses,^  word-plays6  and  oxymora7  are  not 
wanting.  But  he  avoids  all  straining  for  effect  through  the 
observance  of  oratorical  rules ;  he  finds  without  effort  the 
most  striking  form  for  his  lofty  ideas ;  and  it  is  because  his 
innermost  self  breathes  through  every  word  that  most  of  his 
Epistles  bear  so  unique  a  charm. 

4.    We   must   not,   however,    indiscriminately    accept   as 
Pauline  all  that  the  Church  has  handed  down  to  us  under 

1  Gal.  v.  15  ;  2.  Cor.  xi.  20.  -  1.  Cor.  xiii.  1-2  ;  Gal.  iv.  19. 

3  Horn.  ii.  21-26. 

4  E.g.,  the  4  irdvTa  of  1  Cor.  xiii.  7,  the  8  ov  of  xiii.  4-6,  and  cf.  the  fine 
monotony  of  phrase  of  Rom.  ii.  17  fol. 

s  E.g.,  2.  Cor.  vi.  8-10. 

6  E.g.,  that  in  Rom.  iii.  2  fol.,  on  Trjo-Teuetrflat,  amo-rea/,  TT'HTTIS,  and  in  Gal. 
v.  7  fol.  on  TreiOfffdaL  and  Trfia/j.ovrj. 

7  Rom.  i.  20,  TO.  aopara  avrov  .   .   .   KaQoparai. 

E    2 


62         AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

that  name.  The  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  does  not  even  pro- 
fess to  be  by  Paul,  and  of  the  remaining  thirteen  a  few  are 
exceedingly  doubtful,  while  about  half  are  still  hotly  con- 
tested. We  must  at  any  rate  keep  the  possibility  in  view, 
not  only  that  various  writings  early  became  attributed  to  the 
Apostle  through  error  and  false  conjecture  (like  most  of  the 
1  pseudo-Cyprianic '  tracts  to  Cyprian),  but  that  they  were 
deliberately  composed  and  circulated  under  his  name.  We 
should  do  well,  however,  to  avoid  the  word  '  forgery '  in  this  con- 
nection ;  it  is  only  to  the  advantage  of  an  exceedingly  narrow 
view  of  history  that  we  should  attach  ideas  of  fraud  and  deceit 
to  writings  published  by  men  of  a  later  generation  under 
cover  of  some  honoured  name  in  the  past ;  we  thus  make  it 
easy  to  say  that  Holy  Church  cannot  possibly  have  accepted 
such  scandalous  fabrications.  The  boundless  credulity  of 
ecclesiastical  circles,  to  which  so  many  of  the  New  Testament 
Apocrypha — among  them  an  actual  Epistle  of  Jesus  ] — hai 
owed  their  lasting  influence,  will  not  be  got  rid  of  by  a  pi 
fession  of  moral  indignation,  any  more  than  we  shall  do  aw* 
with  the  facts  that  the  ethical  notion  of  literary  property  is 
plant  of  modern  growth  (a  history  of  editions  ought  to 
written  side  by  side  with  that  of  the  Pseud epigrapha  !) ;  thai 
believers  frequently  borrowed  from  the  books  of  other  believe] 
or  of  unbelievers,  without  mentioning  any  source  and  without 
considering  themselves  in  any  way  as  thieves  ;  and  that  with 
the  best  intentions  and  the  cleanest  consciences  they  put 
such  words  into  the  mouth  of  a  revered  Apostle  as  they 
wished  to  hear  enunciated  with  Apostolic  authority  to  their 
contemporaries,  while  yet  they  did  not  regard  themselves 
in  the  smallest  degree  as  liars  and  deceivers.  Not  only  would 
the  indifference  of  orthodox  theology  to  questions  of  genuine- 
ness go  to  prove  this,  but  the  countless  pseudepigrapha  known 
to  us  arose  for  the  most  part  within  the  Church  itself,  and 
there  is  really  no  specific  difference  between  the  arbitrary  way 
in  which  copyists  and  exegetists  treated  the  sacred  writings, 
or  the  literary  habit,  say,  of  composing  discourses  to  be 
placed  under  the  name  of  Peter  or  Paul,  or  the  repre- 
sentation of  Jesus  as  delivering  a  sermon  on  a  given  occa- 
sion which  had  first  been  put  together  out  of  several  separate 

1  T •>  King  Abgurus  of  Eclessa  (see  Euseb.  Hist.  Ixc.  I.  13). 


$  3.]  THK    APOSTLE    PAUL  63 

fragments,-  and  the  attempt  to  construct  complete  Pauline  or 
at  any  rate  Apostolic  letters  after  the  existing  models.  The 
adult eratio  scripturae  of  which  the  Fathers  occasionally  speak 
with  such  horror,  consisted  in  giving  an  heretical  meaning  to 
the  word  of  God,  forgery  in  making  heretical  additions  to  it, 
or  removing  by  erasure  some  of  the  fine  gold  of  the  original. 
And  if  even  some  modern  scholars  often  show  an  entirely 
undeveloped  sense  of  the  difference  between  historical  truth 
and  what  they  consider  as  religious  truth,  we  must  not  blame 
the  Christians  of  the  first  and  second  centuries  if,  with  still 
stronger  subjectivism,  they  applied  their  conception  of  truth 
solely  to  the  substance  of  their  religious  consciousness,  and 
were  quite  indifferent  as  to  the  form  in  which  it  was  clothed. 
The  anecdote  told  by  Tertullian  in  his  'De  Baptismo,'  ch.  17, 
of  the  Asiatic  Presbyter  who  had  to  give  up  his  office  for 
fraudulently  ascribing  his  *  Acts  of  Thekla  '  to  Paul,  is  a  case 
in  point,  for  the  Presbyter  declares  that  it  was  his  love  for 
Paul  that  drove  him  to  write,  and  therefore  he  cannot  have 
had  an  evil  conscience ;  while  his  judges,  including  our 
informant,  were  not  shocked  by  his  literary  fraud  as  such, 
but  by  his  venturing  to  advocate  heresies  in  his  book,  such 
as  that  of  the  right  of  women  to  preach  and  baptize.  So 
that  it  is  not  necessary  to  point  to  the  widespread  custom 
among  the  philosophers  of  that  age,  especially  among  the 
Pythagoreans,  of  passing  off  their  own  writings  as  the 
works  of  the  most  ancient  masters,  or  to  the  infinity  of 
spurious  compositions  then  current  under  the  names  of 
Demosthenes,  Alexander,  or  Plato,  the  authors  of  which  were 
certainly  not  mere  deceivers  ;  nor  even  to  recall  the  fact  that  in 
Jewish  apocalyptic  literature  all  revelations  without  exception 
are  ascribed  to  men  of  old — Daniel,  Ezra,  Enoch,  Noah, 
Abraham,  etc., — for  even  without  these  parallels  we  may 
assert  that  the  tendency  in  the  Early  Church  towards 
'  literary  disguises  '  was  just  as  strong  as  it  was  naive.  In 
the  West  a  certain  perception  of  the  difference  between 
romance  and  history  was  perhaps  more  common,  and  certainly 
Irenaeus  and  Augustine  would  never  have  composed  an 
Epistle  under  the  name  of  Paul.  But  even  here  the  criticism 
applied  to  anyone  who  put  himself  forward  under  the  aegis  of 


54         AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

Apostolic  authority  was  only  concerned  with  questions  of 
tradition  and  orthodoxy  ;  any  work  that  could  produce  plau- 
sible evidence  and  was  unexceptionable  as  to  doctrine,  was 
allowed  to  pass  unchallenged.  It  would  thus  be  more  than 
wonderful  if  from  among  this  mass  of  pseudo-Apostolic 
writings  none  had  found  their  way  into  the  New  Testament : 
more  extraordinary  still,  however,  if  all  the  twenty-one 
canonical  Epistles  were  to  belong  to  that  class,  for,  after  all, 
a  forgery  is  usually  an  imitation  of  some  greater  original,  as 
is  so  clearly  shown  in  all  the  *  apocryphal '  Gospels,  Apo- 
calypses, and  Histories  of  the  Apostles.  Paul  must  first  have 
written  his  Epistles  and  these  Epistles  have  won  repute  and 
influence,  before  those  who  had  not  the  courage  to  appear 
openly  under  their  own  names  could  attempt  to  influence 
Christendom  in  the  customary  form  of  the  didactic  letter,  or 
could  put  forward  their  Apostolic  reflections  under  cover  of 
the  name  of  Peter,  Paul  or  John. 

Four  of  the  Epistles  of  Paul  have  not  been  disputed  even 
by  the  Tubingen  School,  and  only  those  who  lack  all  critical 
power  have  attempted  to  shake  them.  They  are  those  to  the 
Komans,  the  Corinthians  and  the  Galatians.  The  three 
Pastoral  Epistles  are  now  generally  regarded  as  spurious,  but 
the  majority  of  those  who  hold  this  view  are  in  favour  of  the 
genuineness  of  1.  Thessalonians,  Philippians  and  Philemon  ; 
2.  Thessalonians  and  Ephesians  are  almost  universally  given 
up,  as  well  as  large  parts  of  Colossians.  I  do  not,  however, 
hold  that  the  objections  even  to  these  last  three  are  insuper- 
able. 

§  4.  The  First  Epistle  to  the  Thessalonians 

[Cf.  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  vol.  x.,  in  which  W.  Bornemann  undertakes 
the  Epistles  to  the  Thessalonians  (1894,  5th  and  6th  ed.)  ;  '  Hand- 
Commentar,'  ii.  1  (1.  and  2.  Thess.  and  1.  and  2.  Cor.  by  P.  W. 
Schmiedel,  1892),  and  P.  Schmidt :  '  Der  lste  Thessalonicherbrief 
neu  erklart,  nebst  einem  Excurs  iiber  den  2ten  gleichnamigen  Brief ' 
(1885).] 

1.  After  the  address  and  greeting  of  i.  1,  Paul  expresses  in 
somewhat  hyperbolical  terms  his  grateful  satisfaction  at  the 
steadfastness  in  faith  of  his  Thessalonian  friends,  wherein 


§  4.]          THE    FIRST   EPISTLE   TO   THE   THESSALONIANS  'V> 

he  hopes  that  they  may  become  an  example   to   others  far 
beyond   the   borders   of   Macedonia   and   Achaia    (i.    2-10). 
Parallel  with  this  runs   ii.  1-16,  where  the  Apostle  calls  to 
mind  his  former  experiences  in  Thessalonica — the  dark  side 
of  them  as  well  as  the  bright — before  expressing  in  17-20 
his  earnest   desire    for    another   meeting.     But   this   being 
impossible,  he  has  at  all  events  sent  Timothy  to  obtain  news 
of  the  community ;  news  on  the  whole  so  reassuring  that  he 
feels  he  can  now  only  wish  it  further  increase  by  the  grace  of 
God  in  love  and  holiness.1     Here  follows  the  most  clearly 
marked  division  in  the  Epistle ;  in  the  next  two  chapters  Paul 
makes  some  earnest  exhortations,    to  which  the  mention  in 
iii.  10  of  what  was  lacking  in  his  readers'  faith  and  the  good 
wishes  of  vv.  11-13  form  a  delicate  transition  from  the  tone 
of  grateful  remembrance  of  the  earlier  part.     In  iv.  1-12  he 
protests  against   certain  relics  of  heathen  immorality,  espe- 
cially with  regard  to  their  sexual  relations  and  their  ordinary 
dealings  one  with  another,  and  rebukes  a  scandalous  tendency 
to  idleness  which  had  arisen  through  their  excited  expecta- 
tion  of   the   approaching  millennium.     To  this  he  attaches 
some  eschatological  instruction,2  declaring  first  in  iv.  13-18 
that   Christians    who    had    already    '  fallen   asleep '    should 
not    yield    precedence    at    the    Parusia    to   those  who  were 
still  alive,  and   then  warning   his  readers   in  v.  1-11    that 
nothing  was  known  about  the  coming  of  the  Last  Day,  and 
that  their  only  care  must  be  to  see  that  they  were  prepared  for 
it  at  any  moment.     In  what  their  preparation  was  to  consist  he 
explains  in  a  few  more  particular  exhortations  touching  the 
life  of  the  community,  ending  in  good  wishes  and  promises ;  * 
then  comes  a  short  and  hearty  farewell.4 

2.  Those  to  whom  the  Epistle  is  addressed  are  named  in 
i.  1  as  the  Christians  of  Thessalonica,  the  brilliant  merchant 
city  on  the  Gulf  of  Thermae  which  was  at  that  time  the 
capital  of  Macedonia.  According  to  i.  9  and  ii.  14,  the 
community  consisted  entirely  of  Greeks,  former  idolaters — a 
statement  which  contradicts  the  account  in  Acts  xvii.  1-9 — 
who  had  been  converted  to  God  and  the  expectation  of  the 

1  iii.  1-13.  2  iv.  13-v.  11. 

3  v.  12-24.  4  25-28. 


56         AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT       [CHAP.  i. 

return  of  Christ  by  the  preaching  of  Paul,  Silvanus  and 
Timothy,  the  writers  of  the  Epistle.  These  three  had  come 
to  Thessalonica  from  Philippi,  where  they  had  been  '  shame- 
fully entreated,' l  probably  in  the  year  53,  and  according 
to  Acts  xvii.  2  they  had  only  stayed  three  weeks,  because 
the  mob,  incited  against  them  by  the  numerous  Jews  of 
Thessalonica,  had  then  driven  them  away.  Now  the  above- 
mentioned  shortcomings  in  the  manner  of  life  of  the  com- 
munity would  certainly  favour  the  supposition  that  it  had  not 
enjoyed  long  years  of  Apostolic  guidance ;  but  that  Paul 
should  only  have  made  a  three  weeks'  stay  there  is  wholly  in- 
consistent with  the  remarks  he  makes  in  ii.  7  and  10  about 
his  personal  relations  with  his  readers,  while  his  description 
of  the  toil  and  trouble  he  had  had  there  and  of  his  daily 
and  nightly  labours  would  under  such  circumstances  sound 
boastful.  Moreover,  three  weeks  would  certainly  not  have 
been  sufficient  for  the  two  gifts  of  love  mentioned  in 
Philip,  iv.  16,  to  have  reached  him  from  Philippi.  He  had 
left  Thessalonica  abruptly  with  his  two  companions,  heavy  at 
heart  and  full  of  anxious  fears  lest  the  work  so  well  begun 
should  be  destroyed  behind  his  back,  especially  since  the 
Thessalonian  converts  had  from  the  very  first  been  sorely 
oppressed  by  their  compatriots.  Since  he  could  not  return 
thither  himself,  as  he  would  have  preferred  to  do,  he  had 
sent  back  Timothy  from  Athens  2  to  strengthen  the  forsaken 
community,  only  Silvanus  remaining  with  him. 

3.  The  Epistle  was  not  written  from  Athens 3  but  from 
Corinth,  whither  Paul  had  betaken  himself  after  his  some- 
what unsuccessful  appearance  in  the  former  city.4  For  we 
must  infer  from  i.  7  and  8,  that  Achaia  possessed  by  now 
a  considerable  number  of  converts,  and  Paul  evidently  felt 
himself  as  much  at  home  there  as  he  did  in  Macedonia.  Six 
months  at  least  must  have  elapsed  since  his  departure  from 
Thessalonica  :  probably  more,  for  Timothy's  journey  there  and 
back 5  would  have  occupied  some  space  of  time,  and  Paul's 
repeated  plans  of  travelling  thither  G  cannot  be  fitted  into  a 
few  weeks.  Besides  this,  one  or  two  members  of  the  Thessa- 

1  ii.  2  ;  Acts  xvi.  16  fol.  7  iii.  1.  fol.  »  iii.  1. 

4  Acts  xviii.  1.  4  iii.  6.  «  ii.  18. 


§  4.]          THE    FIRST    EPISTLE    TO    Till:    TIIKSSALOXIANS  57 

Ionian  community  had  died  in  the  interval,1  whereas  nothing 
of  the  kind  had  occurred  during  Paul's  visit,  and  since  the 
whole  body  did  not  consist  of  more  than  a  few  hundred  souls 
this  circumstance  would  also  seem  to  suggest  a  longer 
period.  Hence  the  Epistle  could  hardly  have  been  written 
before  53  (for  the  end  of  52  is  the  earliest  date  at  which 
Paul  could  have  set  foot  on  European  soil)  and  certainly  not 
after  54.  But  the  inducements  for  Paul  to  write  it  immedi- 
ately after  Timothy's  return  are  obvious.  They  may  be 
summed  up  as  follows :  his  objects  were  to  draw  the  com- 
munity closer  to  himself,  and  to  sever  it  more  completely 
from  heathenism — but  more  especially,  also,  to  correct  some 
misconceptions  concerning  the  Second  Coming  and  the  fate  of 
Christians  who  had  died  before  it.  In  all  essentials,  of  course, 
Timothy's  report  of  the  Thessalonians  had  been  favourable ; 
he  could  say  that  they  had  remained  true  to  the  Gospel 
against  all  attacks  ;  but  a  certain  mistrust  of  Paul  and  of  the 
sincerity  of  his  interest  in  their  congregation  had  also  arisen, 
which  was  probably  promoted  from  without — the  words  of 
ii.  15  fol.  seem  to  justify  the  conjecture  that  Paul  suspected 
Jewish  intrigues.  Hence  in  chap.  ii.  he  strikes  an  apologetic 
note,  while  in  i.  and  iii.  he  declares  how  he  loves  the 
Church  and  takes  pride  in  it,  only  he  cannot  now  propose 
the  one  proof  of  his  sincere  attachment  to  it  which  was  so 
eagerly  demanded  2 — a  visit  to  Thessalonica  itself.  Besides 
these  reasons  for  writing,  it  was  now  becoming  manifest  in 
various  ways  that  the  Thessalonians  were  as  yet  very  scantily 
instructed  in  the  truths  of  the  faith  and  their  bearing  on  the 
Christian  standard  of  life :  the  idea,  for  instance,  of  a  resur- 
rection of  the  dead  had  still  to  be  solemnly  proclaimed  to 
them.  An  enthusiastic  section  among  them  3  were  behaving 
as  though  the  great  convulsions  of  the  Last  Day  were  already 
upon  them  and  the  old  order  of  things  and  the  old  duties 
all  swept  away  ;  while  side  by  side  with  these  stood  others 
who  in  their  reaction  against  such  a  course  went  too  far 
in  the  opposite  direction,  clinging  tenaciously  to  the  old 
views  and  so  missing  the  profound  meaning  of  the  Christian 
life.  Quarrels  and  insubordination  to  the  elders 4  were  the 

1  iv.  13  fol.  2  iii.  6,  10.  »  iv.  11  fol.  v.  12-15. 


:- 

of 


58         AN   INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP. 

result,  and  many  opportunities  for  malicious  criticism  we: 
given  to  the  enemies  of  the  Church.1    Although  Timothy  ma 
already  have  had  to  deal  with  this  state  of  things,  a  conn 
tion  of  his  words  by  the  chief  Apostle,  at  any  rate  by  letter 
might  still  seem  advisable,  and  he  had  in   all  probabili 
promised  the  perplexed  Thessalonians  a  direct  reply  fro: 
Paul  on  the  subject  of  the  dead. 

4.  In  opposition  to  the  school  of  Baur  the  genuineness 
the  Epistle  should  be  upheld  as  unquestionable.     In  styl 
vocabulary  and  attitude  it  approaches  as  nearly  as  possib 
to  the  four  Principal  Epistles  (see  p.  19)  ;  and  although  t' 
views  laid  down  in  iv.  16  fol.  as  to  the  resurrection  of  '  t' 
dead  in  Christ '  do  not  correspond  with  those  expressed  in 
2.  Cor.  v.,  they  do  correspond  with  those  of  1.  Cor.  xv.  51  fol 
and  Paul  may  very  well  have  changed  his  point  of  view 
this  matter  as  in  others,  in  obedience  to  the  impressions  o 
later  years.     It  is  true  that  in  this  Epistle  Paul  does  no 
make  any  use  of  the  Old  Testament,  which  plays  so  large 
part  in  the  other  four,  and  that  he  does  not  contend  for  t! 
liberty  of  the  Church  against  the  doctrine  of  justification  b; 
the  Law  ;  but  this  is  a  controversy — the  only  one  for  which  t' 
use  of   the  Old  Testament  was  indispensable — on  which 
never  entered  without  provocation  ;  and  in  Thessalonica  the 
were  as  yet  no  Judaists.     The  new  converts  were  threaten 
not  by  a  false  Gospel,  but  by  rabid  hatred  of  any  Gos 
Chapters  i.-iii.,  it  is  suggested,  give  the  impression  of  a  surv 
of  the  history  of  the  Thessalonian  Church  made  by  a  la 
hand,  with  the  help  of  the  materials  furnished  by  the  Ac 
a  knowledge  of  the  Epistles  to  the  Corinthians  is  thought 
be  betrayed  in  it,  and  in  i.  3  the  Pauline  trio  of  faith,  hope 
and  charity  is  supposed  to  be  clearly  connected  with  the  Apo- 
calyptic ' works,  labour  and  patience.'2      The  connection  is 
certainly  accidental ;  works,  labour  and  patience  are  frequent 
ideas  with  Paul ;  and  the  fundamental  Pauline  principle  is  as 
little  compromised  by  the  '  work  of  faith  '  in  1.  Thess.  i.  3,  as 
by  the  hope  expressed  in  Phil.  i.  6  that  He  who  has  begun  a 
'  good  work '  in  the  Philippians  will  perfect  it  until  the  Parusia. 
In  spite  of  a  great  many  points  of  contact  between  our  Epist 

1  iv.  12.  2  Kev.  ii.  2. 


§  4.]          THE    FIRST    EPISTLE    TO    THE    TIIESSALONIANS  59 

and  1.  and  2.  Corinthians,  its  literary  dependence  on  the 
latter  is  not  demonstrable,  and  its  frequent  agreement  with  the 
Acts  should  surely  he  considered  as  evidence  in  favour  of  the 
latter  rather  than  hostile  to  the  Epistle,  while  verse  iii.  1  fol., 
on  the  other  hand,  contradicts  Acts  xvii.  14-16  and  xviii.  5,  in 
a  point  of  some  importance.  Nor  is  it  easy  to  see  from  what 
motive  a  later  writer  should  have  composed  the  Epistle  ;  while 
it  is  hardly  likely  that  he  would  have  made  Paul — as  in  iv.  15 
—express  a  hope  which  he  knew  had  never  been  fulfilled. 
On  the  other  hand,  if  we  assume  that  Paul  was  giving  some 
friendly  advice  to  a  newly  founded  and  as  yet  but  scantily 
instructed  Gentile  community,  the  Epistle  presents  no  diffi- 
culties, while  the  mention  in  v.  12  of  the  rulers  of  the  new 
church,  whom  he  describes  as  those  '  which  labour  among  you 
and  admonish  you,'  does  not  point  to  a  time  of  fully  developed 
hierarchies,  but  just  the  opposite,  for  no  technical  name  (such 
as  bishop  or  presbyter)  is  as  yet  in  existence,  much  less  any 
fixed  jurisdictions.  No  Christian  community,  however,  was 
ever  entirely  without  leaders. 

A  particular  objection  has  been  raised  against  vv.  ii. 
14-16  ;  it  is  contended  that  the  former  persecutor  of  the 
Christians  of  Judaea  could  not  have  suppressed  his  own  part 
in  that  affair ;  that  for  a  patriot  like  Paul l  such  violent  invective 
against  the  Jews  was  unnatural,  and  here  quite  uncalled  for, 
since  the  Jews  had  done  the  Thessalonians  no  harm  ;  and, 
moreover,  that  the  mention  of  the  wrath  of  God  in  verse  16 
evidently  refers  to  the  destruction  of  Jerusalem,  which  Paul, 
seventeen  years  before  it  happened,  could  not  have  spoken  of 
as  a  thing  of  the  past.  But  to  mention  his  own  share  in  the 
persecution  of  the  Christians  at  this  point  would  surely  have 
been  in  bad  taste — was  he  really  obliged  in  the  interests  of 
truth  to  insert  after  the  words  '  of  the  Jews '  the  confession, 
*  of  whom  I  unfortunately  was  then  one  '  ?  Moreover,  he 
speaks  of  the  Jews  in  2.  Cor.  xi.  24  with  much  the  same 
alienation  as  here.  He  had  long  realised  that  in  their  hatred 
of  Christ  they  were  hastening  to  their  own  destruction,  and 
even  a  patriot  may  be  driven  to  bitter  wrath  against  his  coun- 
trymen by  painful  experiences,  especially  if  patriotism  is  not 

1  Kom.  ix.-xi. 


60 

the  ruling  passion  of  his  heart.  Probably  Paul  had  recently 
been  made  to  suffer  heavily  by  the  Jews  at  Corinth,  just 
they  had  been  the  instigators  of  the  agitation  against  him  am 
the  community  at  Thessalonica.  Without  prophesying,  h< 
could  show  that  God's  judgment  had  already  been  fumlle< 
upon  them — he  was  thinking,  not  of  risings  suppressed,  of  th< 
famine  described  in  Acts  xi.  28,  or  of  the  Edict  of  Claudius,1 
but  merely  of  what  he  fears  to  be  the  incurable  blindness  oi 
his  countrymen.  Is  not  the  same  thought  expressed  ii 
1.  Cor.  ii.  8  and  ii.  6?  Verse  16'l>fr  bears  in  the  highest 
degree  the  Pauline  stamp.  In  form,  the  same  is  true  of  the 
abrupt  conclusion  16r,  for  which  a  quotation  from  some  Jewish 
Apocryphon  or  a  gloss  on  the  text  of  Paul's  Greek  Bible  has 
been — quite  superfluously — suggested.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
both  verses  read  like  echoes  from  an  angry  indictment  lateb 
flung  in  the  face  of  his  persecutors  by  Paul.  I  can  thus  see 
no  sufficient  grounds  for  removing  verses  ii.  15  and  16  or  eve 
only  ii.  16  °,  as  interpolations,  from  the  genuine  Epistle  of  Pai 

§  5.  The  Second  Epistle  to  the  Thessalonians 

[Cf.  works  mentioned  in  preceding  §  ;  also  A.  Klopper's  '  Der 
2te  Brief  an  die  Thess.'  in  *  Theologische  Studien  und  Skizzen 
aus  Osfcpreussen '  (ii.  73-140,  1889),  a  clever  but  somewhat  dis- 
cursive defence  of  the  Pauline  authorship  of  the  Epistle;  and 
F.  Spitta,  '  Der  2fce  Brief  an  die  Thess.'  in  '  Zur  Geschichte  u. 
Literatur  d.  Urchristentums,'  vol.  i.  pp.  109-154,  1893  (Timothy 
the  author,  or  rather  the  re-caster,  of  a  Jewish  Apocalypse  of  the 
time  of  Caligula).  For  ii.  1-12  cf.  Bousset, '  Der  Antichrist,'  1895.] 

1.  Upon  the  opening  address  and  greeting,  there  follow 
in  the  rest  of  the  first  chapter,  a  thanksgiving  for  the  faith 
fulness   of   the  community,  especially  under   afflictions, 
recompense    for  which  would  not  be  wanting  on   the   Las 
Day.     This  prepares  the  way  for  the  leading  passage  of  t 
Epistle  (ii.    1-12),  which  continues  and  completes  teachin 
already  given  by  word  of  mouth  concerning  the  Parusia, 
subject  in  regard  to  which  Paul's  readers  had  been  much  di 
quieted.     The  Day  of  the  Lord,  Paul  argues,  cannot  yet  ha 
appeared,  for  even  Antichrist  (so,  at  least,  following  1.  Job 

1  Acts  xviii.  2. 


$  C.]        Till:    SKfoND    EPISTLK    TO    TIIM    TIIKSSALONIANS  61 

we  are  accustomed  to  sum  up  the  various  terms  used  by 
Paul  in  his  description  of  this  mysterious  caricature  of  the 
returning  Christ),  who  must  first  have  brought  the  world's 
sin  to  its  climax,  had  not  yet  been  revealed  ;  he  was  still  only 
working  in  secret,  being  restrained  for  the  present  by  another 
power,  of  whom  the  Thessalonians  knew.  Next  come— still 
with  the  idea  of  the  future  in  view — personal  wishes,  hopes, 
and  requests  of  the  Apostle  for  himself  and  for  the  Thessa- 
lonians,1  followed  by  a  few  earnest  warnings  against  restless 
idleness  and  an  excitement  that  led  to  neglect  of  duty.'-' 
Lastly  we  have  the  farewell  greeting,  specially  emphasised 
as  written  by  Paul's  own  hand. 

2.  If  the  Epistle  is  Pauline  it  must  have  been  written 
after  1.  Thessalonians,  in  which  case  the  words  of  ii.  15  may 
be  readily  taken  as  a  reference  to  that  Epistle ;  any  corre- 
spondence between  Paul  and  the  community  before  the  First 
Epistle,  is  excluded  by  what  is  told  us  there  in  vv.  ii.  17-iii. 
(>.  Moreover,  it  should  be  placed  very  soon  after  the  latter, 
probably  in  the  same  year,  for  the  relations  between  writer 
and  receivers  have  not  substantially  altered  between  the  two 
dates.  Paul  is  still  accompanied  by  Silvanus  and  Timothy/ 
and  the  complaint  in  iii.  2  about  the  'unreasonable  and 
wicked  men '  reminds  us  forcibly  of  the  mood  in  which  he 
wrote  verse  ii.  15  of  the  First  Epistle.  The  Apostle's  opinion 
of  the  community,  too,  is  very  similar  both  in  praise  and 
blame  to  what  it  had  formerly  been,  except  that  the  evils 
created  among  a  certain  section  of  its  members  by  false 
expectations  of  the  future,  and  the  general  restlessness  and 
excitability,  seem  to  have  increased,  so  that  he  desires  to 
have  disciplinary  measures  adopted  in  restraint  of  such 
dangerous  elements.  These  erring  spirits,  it  appears,  ap- 
pealed on  the  one  hand  to  visions  seen  by  them  (j*r)rs 
&i,a  TrvsvpaTos)  and  on  the  'other  to  the  word  and  writing 
of  Paul.  This  rouses  him  to  an  emphatic  denial  of  the  latter 
in  ii.  2,  while  in  iii.  17  he  points  expressly  to  his  hand- 
writing, in  which  the  final  greeting  was  always  written, 
as  the  sign  by  which  all  genuine  epistles  from  him  might 
be  recognised.  From  what  source  Paul  had  derived  his 

1  ii.  13-iii.  5.  «  iii.  6-16.  *  i.  1. 


62         AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

information  we  are  not  told,  and  from  the  indefinite  '  we 
hear '  of  iii.  11  it  may  be  concluded  that  the  bearer  of  it  did 
not  wish  to  be  named ;  at  any  rate  it  cannot  have  been  one 
of  Paul's  travelling-companions.  The  necessity — on  which 
his  informant  must  have  laid  great  stress — for  the  Apostle  to 
assume  once  more  a  decided  attitude  towards  these  fanatics 
must  have  been  the  occasion  for  the  Second  Epistle. 

3.  The  authenticity  of  2.  Thessalonians  has,  however, 
been  disputed  by  the  great  majority  of  investigators,  not 
merely  of  the  Tubingen  school,  from  Baur  onwards.  The 
Epistle,  they  argue,  shows  remarkably  little  connection  with 
its  predecessor  of  the  same  name  ;  vv.  ii.  1-12  excepted,  it  is  in 
fact  nothing  but  a  paraphrase  of  the  First  Epistle,  with  charac- 
teristic departures  from  the  Pauline  phraseology.  Chap,  ii., 
again,  the  section  peculiar  to  the  Epistle,  is  full  of  ideas  quite 
alien  to  Paul,  while  the  warning  against  spurious  epistles,  of 
which  there  can  hardly  have  been  a  thought  during  Paul's 
lifetime,  sounds  as  though  the  later  author  wished  to  ward 
off  such  suspicions  from  himself.  The  great  prominence 
given  to  Apostolic  authority  and  power  l  would  also  seem  to 
point  to  a  later  time,  when  the  Church  gladly  represented  her 
laws  of  discipline  as  derived  from  Paul  himself. 

The  least  important  of  these  arguments  are  those  referring 
to  the  phraseology,  for  on  the  whole  the  style  is  so  thoroughly 
Pauline  that  one  might  indeed  admire  the  forger  who  could 
imitate  it  so  ingeniously.  For  the  rest,  every  Epistle  contains 
some  peculiarities  ;  other  features  again  we  need  not  recognise 
as  such  :  there  is  no  necessity,  for  instance,  to  apply  the  title 
'  Lord,'  which  Paul  always  reserves  elsewhere  for  Jesus  Christ, 
to  God  at  any  point  in  this  Epistle,  not  even  in  iii.  3,  5  ;  and 
the  designation  of  Jesus  as  '  our  Lord  ' 2  is  the  term  most 
familiar  to  the  author.  It  would  certainly  be  very  suspicious 
if  2.  Thess.  designated  Christ  as  God,  a  usage  unknown  in 
Paul ;  but  if  we  turn  to  i.  12  we  find  that  '  our  God  '  means 
something  quite  different  from  '  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ,' 
although  it  is  but  one  grace  that  both  bestow.  The  numerous 
points  of  affinity  with  1.  Thess.  are  explained,  on  the  one 
hand,  by  the  similarity  in  the  circumstances  under  which  both 

1  ii.  15,  iii.  4,  G  9  fol.  and  14.  2  Cf.  iii.  4,  irfTroi'fla^ei/  ei/  KvpiV. 


§6.]        THE    SECOND    EPISTLE    TO    Till:    THKSSALONIANS  63 

were  written,  for  in  the  interval  Paul  can  have  had  very  little 
news  from  the  community,  and  that  little  perhaps  in  writing ; 
on  the  other,  by  the  fact  that  when  certain  Thessalonians 
justified  their  errors  by  appealing  to  his  Epistle  (and  his 
spoken  words),  Paul  did  not  carefully  go  through  the  draft 
of  his  previous  Epistle,  but  called  to  mind  as  accurately 
as  he  could  what  he  had  already  said  on  the  subject  to  the 
community  by  word  of  mouth  and  by  letter.  He  lays  stress 
on  his  authority,  for  pedagogic  reasons,  as  in  1.  Corin- 
thians l  ;  on  the  other  hand,  he  bestows  such  unlimited 
praise  2  upon  each  individual  in  the  community  as  no  later 
defender  of  official  authority  would  have  thought  of  putting 
into  the  mouth  of  the  Apostle.  And  if,  in  opposition  to  certain 
other  statements  of  his,  he  declares  in  iii.  9  that  his  motive 
in  labouring  so  diligently  was  to  give  the  Thessalonians  a 
good  example,  there  is  no  need  to  point  to  the  preceding 
verse,  where  he  states  as  his  motive  '  that  we  might  not 
be  chargeable  to  any  of  you ; '  for  this  shifting  of  his  point 
of  view  for  purposes  of  exhortation  is  a  very  common 
characteristic  of  Paul,  and  is  in  this  connection  specially 
adroit.  '  You  pious  idlers,'  he  seems  to  say,  '  you  appeal  to 
me ;  why,  then,  do  you  entirely  neglect  to  follow  the  ex- 
ample of  unceasing  toil  that  I  have  set  you  ? '  Moreover 
if— much  to  Paul's  astonishment — they  had  appealed  to  an 
Epistle  of  his,  they  may  very  well  have  meant  1.  Thessa- 
lonians ;  they  were  pointing  to  vv.  v.  1-11  in  it 3  as  their 
justification,  since  they  found  that  continual  watchfulness 
and  sobriety  were  not  compatible  with  the  old  rules  of  life. 
Moreover,  by  the  aid  of  an  interpretation  the  like  of  which 
is  still  common  at  the  present  day,  they  managed  to  employ 
vv.  2,  3,  4,  5  in  support  of  their  thesis,  *  the  day  of  light  is 
already  here.' 

Paul,  naturally,  was  not  conscious  of  having  written  them 
a  syllable  in  this  sense,  and  so  he  concluded  from  the 
tidings  that  had  just  reached  him  from  Thessalonica  that  a 
forged  letter  was  circulating  there  under  his  name.  This  mis- 
taken idea  of  his  would  be  amply  sufficient  to  explain  ii.  2  as 
well  as  iii.  17.  But  whoever  credits  one  of  the  Macedonian 

1  iv.  21  and  v.  3-5.  2  i.  3  and  ii.  13.  3  Cf.  ii.  16. 


64         AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

fanatics,  not  only  with  the  unexampled  audacity,  but  with  the 
unexampled  stupidity  of  composing  a  letter  in  the  name  of 
the  Apostle  while  he  still  remained  in  the  neighbourhood,  has 
a  still  easier  explanation  of  ii.  2.  Only  he  must  needs  con- 
fess that  the  mania  for  forgery  must  have  been  uncommonly 
strong  not  to  have  been  restrained  by  the  most  unpromising 
circumstances,  nay  not  even  by  the  Parusia  itself.1  It  cannot 
be  disputed  that  Paul  had  by  now  adopted  certain  fixed  habits 
in  his  correspondence  ;  and  we  are  certainly  not  justified  in  re- 
ferring the  words  sv  TrdcrysTrio-roXfj  to  1.  and  2.  Corinthians  and 
Galatians,  which  were  of  course  not  written  in  the  year  53-54. 
Paul  must  have  written  countless  epistles  both  before  and 
after  2.  Thessalonians,  of  which  all  traces  have  disappeared. 

The  chief  difficulty,  however,  seems  to  me  to  lie  in 
ii.  1-12,  the  passage  which  so  evidently  forms  the  kernel 
of  the  Epistle  that  any  hypothesis  which  inclines  to  treat  it, 
together  with  a  few  other  inconvenient  verses,  as  a  later 
interpolation  inserted  into  a  genuine  Pauline  Epistle,  should 
be  avoided  from  the  very  outset.  It  seems  a  very  plausible 
supposition,  however,  that  a  later  unknown  writer  might 
have  composed  the  Epistle,  with  as  close  a  resemblance  as 
possible  to  1.  Thessalonians  in  its  minor  details,  simply  in 
order  to  make  the  ideas  of  ii.  1-12  appear  genuinely  Apostolic, 
or  even  in  order  to  substitute  for  the  First  Epistle,  whose  pro- 
phecies presented  difficulties  to  a  generation  more  reserved  in 
their  eschatological  beliefs,  one  similar  in  all  other  respects  but 
avoiding  that  danger.  According  to  their  different  interpre- 
tations of  this  passage,  2.  Thessalonians  has  been  variously 
assigned  by  those  who  deny  its  authenticity,  either  to  some 
date  before  70  A.D.,  or  to  the  reign  of  Trajan,  about  110. 

In  the  passage  beginning  at  ii.  1  the  idea  that  the  day  of 
the  Lord  had  already  come  is  contradicted,  since  before  the 
coming  of  Christ,  the  falling  away,  the  coming  of  the  Man  of 
Sin,  must  take  place.  This  Abomination  was  indeed  already 
moving  through  the  existing  world  in  secret,  but  the  community 
knew  what  power  it  was  that  held  him  back,  and  until  this  was 
withdrawn,  the  time  of  the  Gainsayer  KCLT  l^o^v  was  n°t  at 
hand,  much  less  the  hour  for  the  return  of  Christ,  which  would 
instantly  bring  about  the  annihilation  of  the  Lawless  One. 

1  .  .  .  '  by  epistle  as  from  us,  as  that  the  day  of  the  Lord  is  now  present.' 


§  5.]        THK   SECOND    EPISTLE    TO   THE   THESSALONIANS  66 

This  is  a  complete  eschatological  system,  and  there  are 
some  who  like  to  call  the  passage  a  miniature  Apocalypse  ;  it 
does  indeed  remind  us  often  enough  of  the  Apocalypse  of 
John,  although  the  literary  dependence  of  the  one  on  the 
other  ought  never  to  have  been  asserted.  And  in  truth  Paul's 
writings  nowhere  else  present  any  trace  of  such  ideas ;  in 
1.  Thess.  v.  he  says  that  the  day  of  the  Second  Coming  is  not 
to  be  determined,  but  will  come  as  '  a  thief  in  the  night,' 
when  it  is  least  expected  ;  here,  on  the  contrary,  he  calculates 
minutely  what  events  must  separate  the  present  from  the  Day 
of  the  Lord.  Nor  can  the  passage  be  taken  as  a  further 
development  of  the  ideas  set  forth  in  1.  Thess.,  any  more 
than  as  a  foreshadowing  of  the  eschatological  views  of  the 
later  Epistles,  since  according  to  ii.  5  Paul  had  already 
communicated  to  his  readers  by  word  of  mouth  all  that  he 
here  announced  to  them.  The  references  to  contemporary 
history  which  some  have  thought  it  necessary  to  discern  in  the 
two  chief  ideas — of  the  Man  of  Sin,  and  of  the  power  restrain- 
ing him — in  the  first  to  Caligula,  Nero,  or  a  pseudo-Nero,  to 
a  false  Messiah,  or  to  an  upholder  of  heretical  doctrines  ;  in  the 
second,  to  Agrippa,  Claudius,  Vespasian  or  Trajan — would,  if 
proved,  scarcely  admit  the  possibility  of  Pauline  authorship 
for  this  apocalypse.  But  they  are  unnecessary,  especially  the 
suggested  connection  with  Caligula's  impious  design  of  desecrat- 
ing the  Temple  :  sufficient  historical  background  is  supplied 
by  the  events  in  the  time  of  Antiochus  Epiphanes. 

My  own  opinion  is  that  the  undeniable  difficulties  which 
this  chapter  presents  can,  after  all,  be  most  easily  solved  by 
assuming  its  Pauline  authorship.  There  is  no  actual  contra- 
diction between  1.  Thess.  iv.  and  v.  and  this  Epistle  ;  Paul  may 
very  well  have  given  utterance  to  both  views  verbally  in  Thes- 
salonica,  as  he  himself  tells  us  in  vv.  v.  2  of  the  First  Epistle 
and  ii.  5  of  the  Second  ;  and  here,  too,  it  may  be  observed 
that,  as  the  matter  contained  in  ii.  6-10  of  the  Second  Epistle 
is  partially  new  to  his  readers,  so  also  to  the  image  in  vv. 
3  and  4  a  few  touches  are  now  added  for  the  first  time,  for 
the  ravra  of  verse  5  does  not  pretend  to  cover  every  syllable. 
Perhaps  it  covers  even  less  in  reality  than  in  the  thought  of 
the  writer.  But  as  to  the  Parusia,  the  union  of  the  faithful 

p 


66         AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

with  the  Lord  Jesus  and  the  terrible  destruction  of  the  rest, 
the  teachings  of  the  Second  Epistle  are  exactly  the  same  as 
those  of  the  First.  In  1.  Thess.  v.  the  Day  of  the  Lord  only 
comes  *  as  a  thief  in  the  night '  and  '  as  travail  upon  a  woman 
with  child '  for  those  who  are  the  children  of  night,  and  what 
we  learn  in  2.  Thess.  ii.  8  fol.  is  not  in  the  least  inconsistent 
with  this.  In  1.  v.  1  Paul  had  imagined  that  there  was  no 
need  that  he  should  instruct  the  community  as  to  the  times  and 
seasons  of  what  was  to  come,  because  they  knew  the  main 
point,  viz.  that  the  Lord  would  come  bringing  salvation  and 
eternal  life  to  all  believers.  In  the  Second  Epistle  he  recog- 
nises that  instruction  of  this  sort  was  wanted  after  all,  and 
the  direction  which  it  was  to  take  was  shown  him  by  the 
abuses  that  had  already  arisen.  It  now  behoved  a  wise  pastor 
to  insist  on  and  occasionally  to  supplement  the  calming  and 
sobering  influences  contained  in  the  verbal  discourse  on  the 
Last  Things  mentioned  in  1.  Thess.  i.  10.  That  he  should 
have  bestowed  much  thought  on  the  reasons  for  the  post- 
ponement of  the  Lord's  coming  is  of  course  quite  natural — 
it  caused  him  partly  joy  and  partly  sorrow — but  he  never 
doubted  that  the  Lord  was  at  hand  ;  and  that  confidence 
of  his  remains  unshaken  even  through  2.  Thessalonians.1 
The  question  of  what  was  yet  to  come  to  pass  before  the 
Parusia  was  not  a  fundamental  part  of  the  faith  ;  he  was 
here  instructing  the  Catechumens  upon  it,  and  as  it  was  not 
to  them  that  he  addressed  himself  in  his  later  Epistles  there 
was  no  need  to  touch  upon  the  subject  there. 

Nor,  in  my  opinion,  is  there  anything  inconsistent  with 
Paul's  ideas  in  the  details  of  the  '  Apocalypse.'  They  bear 
a  strong  Jewish  stamp  (the  word  *  falling  away '  is  an  instance 
of  this),  for  of  course  the  '  Man  of  Sin '  who  carries  his 
wickedness  to  the  point  of  '  sitting  in  the  Temple  of  God  '  was 
not  conceived  of  as  the  representative  of  faithless  Israel,  still 
less  as  the  head  of  backsliding  Christianity,  but  as  the  personi- 
fication of  a  godless  heathendom,  or  more  accurately,  of  the 
rulers  of  the  world,  who  strive  with  God  for  the  possession 
of  mankind.  Paul  had  received  this  idea  from  the  Rabbinical 
schools,  and  had  not  discarded  it  on  his  conversion,  for  he 

1  cf.  i.  5  10. 


5.]       THE   SECOND    EPISTLE   TO   THE   THESSALONIANS  f>7 

probably  felt  now,  as  before,  that  the  definitive  and  final  revela- 
tion of  the  Majesty  of  God  must  be  preceded  by  the  complete 
and  seemingly  final  triumph  of  the  powers  of  evil,  these  latter 
being  personified  in  Antichrist  as  the  former  in  the  Lord 
Jesus  after  the  manner  of  Semitic  thought,  influenced  by  the 
ideas  of  the  Messiah  and  the  Devil.  Expectations  of  this  sort 
had  been  cherished  among  the  Jews  ever  since  the  time  of 
the  Maccabees,  and  since,  with  very  natural  pessimism,  they 
had  sometimes  imagined  themselves  to  have  gone  through  the 
most  shameful  outbreaks  of  sin  conceivable — and  yet  the 
end  had  not  appeared — the  further  conception  of  a  restraining 
power  (tcarsxov),  which  now  also  began  to  take  personal  shape, 
became  indispensable.  Whatever  Paul  may  have  thought  of 
the  existing  government,1  it  is  quite  possible  that  he  regarded 
the  organised  strength  of  Rome,  which  still  stood  in  some 
degree  for  order  and  right,  as  this  power  *  which  restraineth  '; 
at  any  rate  we  are  no  longer  in  a  position  to  put  forward  any 
more  plausible  hypothesis.  It  is  true  that  the  hopes  of  Rom. 
xi.  25-32  correspond  ill  with  this  picture,  for  there  the  future 
is  painted  in  the  opposite  colours,  the  shining  hues  of  peace  ; 
but  1.  Thess.  v.  3,  6  and  1.  Cor.  xv.  24-26  rank  with  this 
passage,  and  in  vv.  ii.  11  and  12  of  the  Second  Epistle  we  can 
discern  all  the  boldness  of  the  author  of  Romans  ix.,  who 
could  represent  the  Prince  of  Darkness,  the  Antichrist,  as  sent 
to  the  unbelievers  by  God  himself,  in  order  that  they  might 
all  be  condemned.  2.  Thess.  ii.  1-12  is  not  a  Jewish  Apocalypse 
recast  by  a  Christian  hand  and  immortalised  under  the  name 
of  Paul,  but  rather  we  may  learn  from  it,  as  from  so  many 
other  passages,  that  Paul  had  brought  much  with  him  from 
his  Jewish  past,  into  the  period  of  the  '  new  man,'  and  was 
skilful  in  using  it,  tolerably  assimilated,  for  the  edification  of 
Christian  communities. 

If  the  occurrences  in  the  community  presupposed  by 
2.  Thess.  are  by  no  means  extraordinary,  the  Epistle  also 
corresponds  perfectly  with  Paul's  method  of  dealing  with 
such  eccentric  conduct.  I  am  also  inclined  to  think  that  the 
writer  himself  hoped  to  witness  all  that  he  here  describes. 
If  an  imitator  composed  this  brief  Epistle,  in  order  to  counter- 

1  Rom.  xiii.  1  fol. 


68         AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

act  eschatological  extravagance  in  the  Church  by  destroying 
its  fundamental  presuppositions,  he  set  about  his  task  vei 
badly.     As  a  matter  of  fact  he  only  substitutes  for  one  excitii 
theory  of  the  last  things  another  equally  exciting. 

It  may  be  admitted  that  2.  Thess.  is  in  no  sense  a  gre* 
work.     The  Epistle  is  limited  in  range  and  proportionately 
poor  in  original  thoughts :  but  in  Paul's  case,  as  in  others,  it 
was  more  important  to  find  the  right  word  at  the  right  time 
than  to  utter  sublime  mysteries  which  did  not  profit  those  who 
could  not  understand  them  (see  1.  Cor.  xiv.  6).    Assuredly, 
this  short  letter  he  both  gave  the  Thessalonians  food  for  th< 
imagination,  and  strengthened  their  power  of  comprehensioi 

§  6.  The  Epistle  to  the  Galatians 

[Cf.  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  vol.  vii.,  by  F.  Sieffert  (1899) ;  Hand-Co 
mentar  ii.  2  ;  Gal.  Eom.  Phil,  by  E.  A.  Lipsius  (1892) ;  C.  Holsten' 
'  Das  Evangelium  des  Paulus '  (1880),  a  complete  analysis  of  th 
connection  of  thought  between  Galatians  and  1.  Corinthians,  carried 
out  with  as  much  single-minded  devotion  to  the  subject  as  stri 
critical  insight,  but  a  work  in  which  Paul  is  judged  too  one-sidedly 
the  rules  of  logic.     It  is  interesting  to  compare  this  with  a 
which  may  be   similarly  described  and  yet  is  quite   different 
result,  the  '  Brief  des  Paulus  an  die  Galater  '  of  M.  Kahler  (1884 
Also   A.  Schlatter's  '  Der  Galaterbrief  ausgelegt  fur  Bibelle 
(1890),  an  independent  work  not  entirely  without  scientific  me 
in  spite  of  its  edifying  tendency  ;  J.  B.   Lightfoot's  '  St.  Paul 
Epistle   to  the  Galatians  '    (1892),  the  most  complete  collection 
we  have  of  technical  material  for  the  interpretation  of  the  text ; 
E.    Schiirer's  '    '  Was  ist  unter  TaXarla  in   der    Uberschrift 
Galaterbriefs    zu   verstehen  ?  '    ('  Jahrbiicher   fur  protestanti 
Theologie,'   1892,  p.  460),  and  W.  M.    Eamsay's    'A  Histori 
Commentary  on  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians '  in  the  Expositor  for 
1899,  p.  57.     (See  above,  p.  33.)] 

1.  Apart  from  the  address  and  greeting  of  the  first  verses 
and  a  brief  final  summary  in  vi.  11-18,  Galatians  consi 
of    three  clearly   marked  divisions,   beginning    respectivel 
at  i.  6,  iii.  1  and  v.  18.      At  the  point  where  the   Apostle 
usually  expresses  his  gratitude,  he  gives  vent  in  this  Epistle ' 
to  painful  surprise  that  his  readers  should  have  fallen  away 

1  i.  6-10. 


$  6.]  Till;    Kl'ISTLE    TO    THE    GALATIANS  69 

from  his  true  Gospel  to  follow  a  different  and  accursed 
one,  as  against  which  he  declares  that  his  Gospel  was  '  not 
after  man.' '  This  thesis,  to  establish  which  is  the  main 
object  of  the  Epistle,  is  first  placed  on  an  historical  basis  '2  by 
the  assertion  that  neither  his  Gospel  nor  his  Apostolate  was 
*  received  of  man.'  In  support  of  this  he  first  points  to  his  call 
and  to  his  seventeen  years'  activity,3  in  which  there  was  no 
question  of  any  dependence  on  man,  and  then 4  relates  how, 
without  sacrificing  a  particle  of  his  own  Gospel,  he  was  recog- 
nised in  Jerusalem  by  the  pillars  of  the  Church  as  the  Apostle 
of  the  Gentiles,  with  rights  equal  to  their  own. 

Then  follows  the  strongest  proof  of  his  independence5 — 
the  account  of  how  he  publicly  rebuked  the  great  Cephas  at 
Antioch,  and  upheld  the  equal  rights  of  the  Gentile  Christians 
against  him.  The  recapitulation  of  the  speech  he  made  on 
that  occasion  forms  the  transition  to  the  second  division, 
the  actual  demonstration  of  the  truth  and  divinity  of  the 
Gospel  of  freedom  from  the  Law.  In  iii.  1-5  he  reminds 
the  Galatians  of  their  own  experiences,  of  how  they  received 
the  Holy  Ghost,  not  through  observance  of  the  Law,  but 
through  faith  in  Jesus  Christ ;  and  then  in  the  following 
verses6  he  appeals  to  the  witness  of  Scripture  itself,  which  in 
Abraham's  time,  long  before  the  Law  appeared,  made  its 
promises  dependent  upon  faith  alone.  The  Law  was  not 
thereby  set  aside — it  did  not  pretend  to  be  more  than  a 
4  schoolmaster,'  an  expedient  of  secondary  importance7 — but 
now  the  appearance  of  Christ,  the  seed  of  promise,  had  put 
an  end  to  the  period  of  bondage  and  raised  us  from  the 
position  of  slaves  to  that  of  free  sons  and  heirs,8  who  by 
falling  back  into  the  service  of  the  Law  would  do  no  better 
than  return  to  paganism.9  And  then,  with  a  sudden  change 
from  the  didactic  tone  to  one  of  moving  tenderness,  he  appeals 
to  the  feelings  of  the  Galatians  and  the  childlike  love  that 
they  formerly  bore  him,  in  order  to  tear  them  away  from 
these  new  false  friends  of  theirs.10  Next,  from  iv.  21  to  v. 
12,  he  again  takes  up  the  argument  against  the  Law  from  the 

1  i.  11.  •  i.  6-ii.  21.  3  i.  13-24.  4  ii.  1-10. 

5  ii.  11-21.  6  iii.  6-18.  r  iii.  19-24. 

9  iii.  25-iv.  7.  »  iv.  8-11.  10  iv.  12-20. 


70         AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

Law  itself,  with  an  allegorical  turning  of  the  story  of  Ishmael 
and  Isaac,  repudiating  all  half-measures  and  urging  upon  his 
readers  the  necessity  of  choosing  between  bondage  and  freedom, 
damnation  and  grace — for  in  his  passionate  excitement  he 
cannot  but  picture  to  himself  all  that  they  had  at  stake, 
or  refrain  from  bitter  imprecations  against  their  deluders 
(ol  avaararovvres  v^as).  But  in  order  to  prevent  any 
misunderstanding  by  which  *  freedom  from  the  Law  '  might 
be  interpreted  as  a  danger  to  morality  and  mutual  love,  he 
adds  the  explanation  ] :  they  are  to  '  walk  in  the  Spirit,'  for 
the  Spirit  of  God  which  is  brought  by  faith  cannot  endure 
the  presence  of  any  of  the  '  works  of  the  flesh.'  A  few 
special  words  of  advice  are  added  2  against  self-conceit  and 
egotism,  but  the  main  idea  is  not  lost  sight  of — that  salvation 
and  eternal  life  can  only  be  reaped  where  the  good  seed  has 
been  scattered  on  the  soul.  So  that  in  practice  also  his 
Gospel  proves  itself  to  be  divine  by  the  moral  results  which 
it  produces.  Greetings  and  personal  requests  would  here  be  out 
of  place  ;  all  those  to  whom  the  letter  is  directed  were  in  danger 
of  going  astray,  and  with  a  hand  that  trembles  with  emotion 
he  now  addresses  to  all  a  last  earnest  cry  of  warning.3 

2.  The  strong  excitement  under  which  the  Epistle  is 
written  excludes  all  idea  of  forgery,  and  explains  the 
occasional  obscurities  of  expression,  as  well  as  the  audacities 
or  flaws  in  the  argument,  better  than  any  theory  of  interpola- 
tion. Every  sentence  shows  why  Paul  had  taken  up  his  pen  : 
the  Christians  of  Galatia  were  in  danger  of  falling  a  prey  to 
a  false  Gospel.  Agitators  hostile  to  Paul '  had  penetrated  into 
the  community,  among  them  at  least  one  person,  probably,  of 
conspicuous  authority 5 — although  that  this  was  either  Peter  or 
Barnabas  is  equally  unlikely.  They  had  made  a  deep  im- 
pression, inexplicable  to  Paul,  upon  the  Galatians,  who  were 
evidently  not  as  yet  sufficiently  clear  and  steadfast  in  their 
faith.6  Paul,  standing  in  the  very  thick  of  the  fight,  was 
unable  to  impute  any  but  selfish  motives  to  these  men 7 ;  he 
calls  down  a  curse  upon  them,8  and  declares  that  the  accept- 

1  v.  13-25.  2  v.  26-vi.  10.  3  vi.  11-18. 

4  ol  rapj.(rffovTfs  fyxaj,  i.  7,  v.  10,  vi.  12  fol.  a  V.  10. 

*  i.  6,  iii.  1,  v.  7.  T  i.  7,  iv.  17,  vi.  12  fol.  •  i.  8,  v.  12. 


§  6.]  THE    EPISTLE    TO    THE    GALATIANS  71 

ance  of  their  Gospel  was  equivalent  to  a  forfeiture  of  grace.1 
Any  compact  with  them  he  felt  to  be  out  of  the  question. 
Accordingly  he  bids  his  readers  choose  uncompromisingly 
between  himself  and  them,2  even  though  they  abstained  from 
direct  attack  upon  him,  offered  to  explain  his  silence  as  to 
certain  claims  of  the  new  religion  on  the  ground  of  a 
teacher's  consideration  for  his  flock,3  and  even  attempted  to 
base  themselves  to  some  extent  upon  his  authority.1  In- 
directly, however,  they  must  doubtless  have  striven  to  detach 
the  Galatians  from  him,  to  represent  him  as  an  authority  of 
secondary  rank,  who  had  only  heard  of  Christ  and  his 
Gospel  through  the  medium  of  the  Primitive  Apostles,  and 
therefore  had  no  right  to  proclaim  a  free  Gospel  in  opposi- 
tion to  those  who  had  given  him  his  commission.  Paul 
deals  with  this  point  from  i.  15  to  ii.  21,  and  in  ii.  7  actually 
represents  himself  as  undoubtedly  the  highest  human  authority 
for  the  Gentile  world. 

But  the  question  at  issue  was  not  one  of  form ;  these 
agitators  wished  to  impose  upon  the  Galatians5  the  Law 
under  which  they  themselves  had  been  born  and  bred,  or  at 
least  to  exact  from  them  a  strict  observance  of  its  chief 
provisions,  such  as  circumcision 6  and  the  celebration  of  the 
Jewish  feasts.  Above  all  they  naturally  demanded  the 
keeping  of  the  Sabbath,7  as  an  essential  condition  of  the 
salvation  promised  to  the  children  of  Abraham.8  They 
themselves  had  not,  like  Paul,9  opposed  these  '  works  of  the 
Law '  to  '  Faith,'  but  had  persuaded  themselves,  and  then 
with  very  intelligible  success  the  Galatians,  that  perfect 
righteousness,  the  very  object  for  which  the  believer  struggled, 
could  only  be  attained  by  the  strict  fulfilment  of  the  will  of 
God  made  manifest  in  the  Law.10  In  reply  to  this  Paul 
defines  his  point  of  view  in  the  clearest  way :  the  Law  and 
Faith,  in  his  eyes,  were  mutually  exclusive,  damnation  being  as 
indissolubly  connected  with  the  one  as  grace  with  the  other.11 
1  v.  4.  -  v.  7,9.  3  i.  10. 

4  i.  8,  Kal  €av  ripels  .  .  .  ;  v.  11,  et  ireptro/iV  en  Kijpvffaw,  to  be  understood 
in  the  same  sense  as  ii.  14,  ei  arv  .  .  .  WVIKWS  fts. 

5  v.  1,  iv.  21.  6  vi.  12  fol.,  v.  3. 
7  iv.  10.                           s  iii.  7  fol.,  vi.  16.  9  iii.  2,  5. 

10  v.  4,  iii.  3  (*iriTe\e«<r0e),  iii.  8,  11 ;  ii.  16,  21.  u  iii.  10  fol.,  v.  3,  4. 


72         AN   INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

The  Law  as  the  outward  standard  of  morality  had  been 
superseded  by  the  inward  and  transforming  power  of  the 
heavenly  Spirit,  the  vo^os  rov  Xpia-rov.1  Therefore  any 
attempt  to  rehabilitate  it  after  its  destruction  by  the  death  of 
Christ  on  the  Cross,  must  be  branded  as  a  denial  of  God,  of 
Christ  and  of  the  Holy  Ghost 2 ;  nay,  Paul  goes  so  far  as  to 
declare  that  the  relapse  of  the  community  towards  the  ideals 
of  Judaism  was  equivalent  to  a  return  to  their  former  idolatry.3 
Thus  he  unconsciously  proclaims  Christianity  as  a  new 
religion,  equally  opposed  to  Judaism  and  to  Greek  Polytheism. 

The  object  of  the  whole  Epistle  lies  in  this  declaration  ; 
even  the  warnings  of  v.  13-vi.  10,  although  they  do  contain 
references  to  particular  faults  among  the  Galatian  community, 
such  as  strife,  arrogance  and  moral  laxity,  help  to  confirm 
the  main  thesis — that  only  the  Gospel  preached  by  Paul  was 
from  heaven. 

3.  The  Epistle  is  addressed  to  the  '  Churches  of  Galatia.' 4 
These  communities,  unlike  those  of  Achaia,  Macedonia  and 
Asia,  where  larger  towns  were  gradually  singled  out  as  capitals 
and  naturally  assumed  a  leading  position,  seem  to  have 
been  distributed  evenly  over  a  strip  of  country,  and  to  have 
grown  up  under  like  conditions,  and  remained  so,  till  the  time 
when  the  Epistle  was  written.  The  province  of  Galatia,  a 
country  for  the  most  part  of  fruitful  plough-land  and  pasture, 
lying  in  the  centre  of  Asia  Minor  and  shut  off  from  the  sea 
on  all  sides,  had  received  its  name  from  the  hordes  of  Celts 
which,  sweeping  over  from  Europe  in  the  third  century  B.C., 
had  here  found  a  permanent  resting-place.  Since  then  they 
had  of  course  become  civilised — that  is  to  say,  Hellenised— 
in  every  way ;  but  though  their  old  dislike  to  crowding 
together  into  cities  may  have  lingered  on,  allusions  to  the 
relics  of  a  Celtic  religion  in  the  passage  beginning  at  iv.  9 
could  only  be  traced  by  the  same  morbid  ingenuity  that  so 
eagerly  advocates  the  Teutonic  origin  of  the  Galatians. 
Whether  the  few  hundred  Christians  to  whom  this  Epistle  is 
addressed  were  descended  from  the  conquerors  of  280-240 
B.C.  or  from  later  Greek  and  Oriental  immigrants,  it  is 

1  v.  5,  18,  25,  vi.  2.  -  ii.  18-21,  iii.  14,  iv.  ->'.). 

1  iv.  8-11.  2,  and  see  1.  Cor.  xvi.  1. 


§  6.]  THK    KF1STLE   TO   THE    GALATIANS  73 

impossible  to  say,  nor,  in  the  face  of  verse  iii.  28,  ought  it  to 
interest  anyone.  As  for  the  part  of  Galatia  in  which  to  look 
for  the  oldest  Christian  communities,  which  certainly  lay 
near  together  and  were  not  very  numerous,  conjecture  is 
equally  futile ;  the  western  part  seems  to  be  indicated  in 
the  Acts.1 

For  the  last  seventy  years,  however,  an  hypothesis  has 
been  very  much  in  favour  according  to  which  the  *  Galatia  ' 
of  our  Epistle  should  be  taken  in  a  wider  sense  to  mean  all 
the  provinces  placed,  since  the  death  of  King  Amyntas  in 
B.C.  25,  under  the  rule  of  a  single  Propraetor,  especially 
Lycaonia  and  Pisidia.  In  that  case  the  'churches  of 
Galatia  '  might  consist  of  those  named  in  the  Acts  2  as  having 
been  founded  on  the  so-called  First  Missionary  Journey — the 
communities  of  Antiochia  Pisidiae,  Iconium,  Lystra  and 
Derbe.  The  wording  of  the  Acts,  however,  is  in  the  first 
place  unfavourable  to  this  theory ;  something  apart  from 
Pisidia  and  Lycaonia  is  to  be  understood  in  the  term  Galatia. 
But  even  if  in  official  phraseology  the  name  Galatia  had 
included  the  districts  of  Pisidia  and  Lycaonia,  and  if  Iconium 
or  Derbe  had  been  officially  designated  as  Galatian  towns,  it 
would  still  be  far  from  probable  that  in  the  course  of 
seventy-five  years  the  inhabitants  of  these  towns  should  have 
grown  accustomed  to  calling  themselves  Galatians.  It  is  one 
thing  to  be  incorporated  into  a  powerful  and  haughty  State 
like  Bavaria  ;  it  is  a  very  different  matter  to  be  attached  to  an 
administrative  district  like  the  New  Galatia  of  the  Eomans.  In 
addressing  Pisidians  and  Lycaonians  as  '  0  foolish  Galatians  ' 
(iii.  1),  Paul — whom,  it  is  true,  modern  admirers  credit  with 
the  rule  of  never  employing  an  old  local  name  unless  it  had 
become  the  name  of  a  Roman  province — would  have  been  guilty 
of  using  as  utterly  inappropriate  a  phrase  as  would  a  speaker  of 
to-day  in  apostrophising  the  citizens  of  Frankfort-on-the-Main 
as  '  0  wealthy  men  of  Hesse  Nassau.'  Belief  in  the  new 
hypothesis  becomes  most  difficult  when  it  appears,  as  with 
Zahn,  combined  with  the  old  suppositions  :  namely,  that  the 
first  visit  of  the  Apostle  only  concerned  the  Southern 

1  xvi.  6.  -  xiii.  fol. 


74         AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP. 

Galatians,  though  the  second  also  included  Galatia  proper. 
Does  it  follow  that  communities  which,  like  those  of  Deri 
and  Pessinus,  lay  more  than   120  miles  apart,  had  become 
blent  within  a  few  months  in  the  same  life  and  the  sam( 
errors  ?     However,  the  whole  controversy  is  but  of  slend( 
importance.     Not  even  chronology  has  anything  to  gain  by  it 
and  if  instead  of  '  Galatians  '  we  say  l  Christian  communiti* 
in  the  interior  of  Asia  Minor/  the  dispute  is  at  an  end. 

Paul  was  the  founder  of  these  Galatian  communities 
was  he  who  had  first  proclaimed  the  Gospel  among  them. 
He  had  never  intended  at  the  time  to  preach  to  them,  bi 
illness   had   forced   him   to   make  a   long  sojourn   in   theii 
country,  and  he  remembers  with  emotion  how  lovingly  and 
eagerly  they  had  surrendered  themselves  to  him.     This  aloru 
is  enough  to  differentiate  the  Galatian  mission  from  that 
Pisidia  and  Lycaonia  ;  the  flight  of  Barnabas  and  Paul 
Lystra  and  Derbe  is  not  precisely  represented  in  the   Acl 
as   a  convalescent   trip   after   an   attack  of   malaria.     It 
true  that  Barnabas,  who  took  part  in  the  Pisidian  missioi 
seems   from    chap.    ii.    to    have   been   well   known   to   tl 
Galatians,  while  Titus  had   yet  to  be  introduced   to  thei 
But  Cephas  is  also  known  to  them,  and  of  course  the  fals 
apostles    played    off    the    authority    of    those    two   men- 
Barnabas  and  Cephas— against  Paul ;  and  this  is  the  reas< 
why  Paul  is  so  much  concerned  to  establish  his  particul* 
relation  to  them  beyond  all  doubt.     But  he  always  declart 
that  it  was  he  alone  who  first  preached  the  Gospel  among 
them.     The  plural  of  i.  8  fol.  (which,  by  the  way,  passes  into 
the  singular  in  i.  9)  would  probably  not  have  been  analysed 
by  the  Galatians  into  a  series  of  individual  components,  whi< 
in  verse  9  must  needs  be  different  from  what  they  were  in 

The  great  majority  of  the  Christians  of  Galatia  hi 
formerly  been  heathens.2  Elements  of  Jewish  nationality  were 
probably  altogether  lacking  among  them,  for  the  passages 
brought  forward  to  prove  their  existence  3  must  either  establish 
the  Jewish  extraction  of  all  or  of  none  of  the  Galatians. 
The  *  ye  all '  of  iii.  26  and  28,  might  certainly  stand  in 


iv.  19,  iii.  2  fol.,  i.  8,  9. 

iii.  2,  13  fol.,  23  fol.,  iv.  3,  5,  v.  1. 


iv.  8,  v.  2  fol.,  vi.  12 


$  6.]  THE   EPISTLE   TO   THE   GALATIANS  75 

implied  antithesis  to  the  thought  '  not  merely  the  minority 
among  you  of  Jewish  birth.'  But  in  both  cases  the  emphasis 
lies,  not  on  the  -jravrss,  but  on  the  predicate,  that  assures  to 
every  believer  the  present  possession  of  salvation,  or  rather 
of  the  highest  guarantees  of  salvation.  The  agitation  of  the 
Judaists  had  originated  from  outside,  probably  not  without 
the  support  of  the  '  false  brethren  '  of  Jerusalem,  in  describ- 
ing whom  Paul  had  the  heresy-mongers  of  Galatia  in  his 
mind.  With  the  Holy  Scriptures  to  support  them — which 
Paul  himself  had  taught  his  converts  to  revere  as  the  Word 
of  God — it  was  easy  to  convince  the  theologically  untrained 
Galatians  of  the  necessity  of  circumcision,  especially  when  Paul 
and  his  friends  had  safely  turned  their  backs  upon  the  place. 
The  date  of  the  foundation  of  these  communities  cannot  be 
established  with  any  certainty  from  the  Epistle  itself,  but  ac- 
cording to  Acts  xvi.  6  it  was  during  the  great  journey  which 
eventually  took  the  Apostle  on  to  European  soil — that  is  to 
say,  about  52-3  A.D. 

4.  The  question  as  to  the  date  at  which  the  Epistle  was 
written  is  a  more  difficult  one.  Apparently  Paul  had  already 
paid  his  readers  two  visits,1  the  second  as  well  as  the  first  in 
his  capacity  of  preacher,  i.e.  in  successful  efforts  to  increase 
the  number  of  believers,  perhaps  also  of  churches,  in  Galatia. 
The  words  of  i.  6 2  give  us  the  impression  that  these  visits 
were  not  separated  by  any  great  interval  of  time,  and  that 
the  latter  especially  had  taken  place  quite  recently.  The 
aforementioned  agitations  probably  only  arose  after  the 
second,  for  the  TmXtz/,  *  again,'  of  v.  3,  would  be  more  likely 
to  refer  to  the  thoughts  expressed  in  chap.  iii.  (especially 
verse  10)  than  to  any  verbal  declarations  ;  and  if  by  the 
Trposiprjfca/jLsv  of  i.  9  we  do  not,  with  Luther,  understand 
verse  8,  but  other  imprecations  previously  uttered,  we  may  be 
led  to  suppose  that  Paul  was  forced  to  make  use  of  such  pro- 
testations— to  which  he  is  here  merely  lending  additional  force 
— at  his  first  as  well  as  every  succeeding  visit  to  any  town. 
The  excitement  that  runs  through  the  whole  Epistle,  and  the 
arguments  Paul  uses  in  it,  are  hardly  compatible  with  the 

1  iv.  13.  2  See  also  iv.  16,  18,  20. 


76         AX    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP. 

assumption  that  he  had  observed  traces  of  Judaistic  influences 
among  the  Galatians  in  his  recent  visit,  but  had  easily  over- 
come them  and  cheerfully  continued  on  his  journey.  It  is  more 
probable  that  the  news  of  the  defection  of  the  Galatians  took 
him  completely  by  surprise,  for  it  assuredly  did  not  reach  hi 
through  an  official  deputation  from  the  churches,  nor  by  a  let 
from  them,  to  which  he  would  certainly  have  referred,  howev 
briefly.  He  did  immediately  all  that  he  could  do  from  a 
distance  to  prevent  the  worst.  If,  then,  the  second  visit  is  that 
mentioned  in  Acts  xviii.  23,  it  must  have  occurred  during  th 
so-called  third  journey :  that  is  to  say,  before  Paul's  stay  o 
several  years'  duration  in  the  province  of  Asia  ;  and  th 
Epistle  must  have  been  written  during  that  stay  itself,  pr< 
bably  on  one  of  the  expeditions  made  from  Ephesus  f< 
missionary  purposes,  since  Paul  makes  no  mention  in  it  of  an 
Christian  community  surrounding  him.  Only  those  of  t 
brethren  who  were  known  to  the  Galatians  are  with  hi 
probably  the  fellow-preachers  who  had  accompanied  him  o: 
his  last  visit  thither.  Hence  it  follows  that  any  but  the  yea 
55-57  are  excluded. 

And  indeed  this  assignment  seems  to  me  to  be  almost  ce 
tain.     The  objection  that  Paul  could  have  hurried  in  pers 
to  Galatia  from  Ephesus  or  its  neighbourhood,  if  he  found 
voyage  from  Ephesus  to  Corinth  so  easy,  does  not  hold ;  f 
Paul  nowhere  says  that  he  was  prevented  from  coming 
suggests  any  reason  against  coming.     Perhaps  he  had  re 
to  think  he  would  effect  more  by  a  letter  than  by  a  person 
visit.     It  must  be  remembered  that  he  could  look  back  to 
pleasant  experiences  with  the  Corinthian  community  (§  7, 
The   gentle   tone   in   which    in    1.  Cor.  xvi.    he    mentio 
the  orders  he  gave  to  the  Galatians  for  a  collection  can  onl 
be  explained  on  the  assumption,  either  that  he  had  set  matte 
straight  in  Galatia  by  his  Epistle,  and  had  recently  sent  the 
paternal  advice  once  more,  or  that  1.  Cor.   xvi.  dates  from 
before  the  Galatiari  catastrophe,  and  the  orders  in  questio 
were   given   somewhere   during  his  second    stay  in  Gala 
The  latter  possibility  seems  preferable,  because  we   find 
Galatian  delegates  mentioned  either  in  Kom.  xv.  26  or  Ac 
xx.  4  (unless  '  Gaius  of  Derbe  '  is  to  be  considered  a  Galatian) 


§  6.]  THE    EPISTLE   TO   THE    GALATIANS  i  / 

among  the  deputation  which  brings  the  Collection,  and  this 
cannot  but  reawaken  our  suspicion  that  the  relations  between 
Paul  and  the  Galatians  were  at  that  time  broken  off — a  thing 
which  was  indeed  bound  to  occur  unless  the  Galatians  had 
immediately  renounced  their  Judaistic  perverters. 

Under  these  circumstances,  then,  we  are  brought  down  to 
the  second  half  of  the  stay  at  Ephesus.     Moreover,  we  have 
not  the  slightest  interest  in  referring  this  Epistle,  which  for- 
mulates more  sharply  than  any  other  the  anti-Jewish  and 
anti-legal  ideas  of   the   Apostle,  to   the    earliest   practicable 
period  in  his  life.     The  Epistle,  though  surpassed  by  others  in 
wealth  of   thought,  would  on  account   of   its  clearness   and 
decision  deserve  to  be  regarded  as  the  last  testament  of  the 
Apostle  to  his  Gentile  churches  on  his  departure  from  them. 
But,  in  dating  the  Epistle  as  late  as  the  period  of  captivity 
in  Rome,  the   Fathers  were   only  resting   on  the   words  of 
vi.  17,  whereas  Paul  need  not  have  waited  till  the  time  of  his 
imprisonment  to  speak  of '  the  marks  of  the  Lord  Jesus  '  which 
he  '  bears  in  his  body  '  (cf.  2.  Cor.  xi.  23  fol.) ;  still  less,  how- 
ever, need  we  suppose  that  such  words  could  only  have  been 
uttered  in  the  first  months  after  the  sufferings  he  endured  at 
Philippi  in  52-3.     Nor,  finally,  can  any  earlier  date  be  ac- 
cepted, such  as  the  journey  begun  immediately  after  the  meet- 
ing of  the  Apostles  at  Jerusalem  in  52,  for  in  the  seventeen 
years  of  Paul's  missionary  work  described  in  i.  15-24  there 
was  no  room  for  the  foundation  of  the  Galatian  churches, 
and,  however  briefly  he  expresses  himself  in  i.  21,  he  could 
not  have  omitted  to  mention  his  appearance  in  Galatia,  if 
that  had  indeed  taken  place  before  the  events  of  ii.  1.     To 
gather  from  the  words  of  ii.  5 — '  that  the  truth  of  the  gospel 
might   continue  with   you ' — that  this  journey  of  Paul's  to 
Jerusalem  was  necessitated  precisely  by  the  Judaistic  agitation 
in  Galatia,  or  that  as  soon  as  the  Judaistic  reaction  arose  Paul 
was  alarmed  for  his  Galatian  children,  is  to  overlook  the  fact 
that  the  Apostle's  historical  narrative  J  received  all  its  colour 
from  the  immediate  interest  of  the  narrator  in  it ; — instead  of 
his  adversaries  in  Jerusalem  he  now  has  before  his  eyes  the 

1  Vv.  4  and  5  especially,  and  cf.  ver.  10. 


78 


AN    LN 


CHAP. 


false  brethren  who  had  crept  in  privily  beside  him  in  Galatia  : 
instead  of  those  whom  he  had  there  protected,  the  threatened 
Galatians — a  subtle  piece  of  tactics,  and  how  intelligible  frc 
the  psychological  side !  He  says  '  ye,'  where  properly 
should  stand,  from  the  same  tenderness  of  feeling  as  in  iii.  21 
29.  It  is  true  that  he  informs  his  readers  of  the  proceedii 
of  the  Council  of  Jerusalem  as  of  something  quite '  new,'  but 
this  does  not  prove  that  they  had  only  just  occurred,  or  that 
Paul  had  had  no  intercourse  with  his  readers  in  the  interval,  for 
he  wisely  spoke  of  such  things  only  in  case  of  need,  seeing  how 
easily  they  might  shake  men's  confidence  in  the  truth  of  his 
Gospel.  Nor  is  there  any  meaning  in  ii.  10  unless  Paul  had 
had  some  opportunity  of  proving  his  zeal  since  the  time  of 
the  Council.  In  short,  even  if  the  Galatians  are  the  Chris- 
tians of  Lycaonia,  the  Epistle  cannot  have  been  written 
early  as  twelve  months  after  the  Council  of  the  Apostl< 
True  that  Zahn  places  it  before  1.  Thessalonians  ;  but  than! 
to  the  immense  apparatus  of  messages,  corresponding  plans 
and  missions  to  and  fro  which  he  constructs  for  us,  he  compels 
every  calculating  reader  to  postulate  a  longer  interval  than  foi 
to  six  months  between  the  commencement  of  the  Europe* 
mission  and  the  composition  of  our  Epistle.  Chronological!; 
Galatians  is  the  third,  perhaps  the  fourth,  of  the  Epistles 
Paul  which  have  come  down  to  us. 


§  7.  The  Tivo  Epistles  to  the  Corinthians 

[Cf.  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  vols.  v.  and  vi.,  by  G.  Heinrici  (1896  and 
1900), and  Holtzmann's  ' Hand-Comrnentar '  ii.  1.,  in  which  Land 
2.  Thess.  and  1.  and  2.  Corinthians  are  taken  by  P.  W.  Schmied 
(1892). 

For  commentaries  on  both  Epistles  cf.  G.  Heinrici,  1 
(careful  and  independent).  On  1.  Cor.,  F.  Godet,  translated  in 
German  by  K.  Wunderlich,  1886-88  (containing  delicate  aestheti 
and  religious  observation,  but  wanting  in  comprehension  of  t 
critical  problems  involved),  and  C.  Holsten,  in  his  '  Evangelium 
des  Paulus'  (v.  supra,  p.  68).  On  2.  Cor.,  A.  Klopper,  1874.  Also 
innuim-nihli;  monographs,  among  which  J.  F.  Rabiger's  '  Kritische 
Untersuchungen  iiber  den  Inhalt  der  beiden  Briefe  des  Apostels 


§  7.]  THE    TWO    EPISTLES   TO   THE    CORINTHIANS  79 

Paulus  an  die  korinthische  Gemeinde '  (1886)  is  especially  valuable 
for  its  clear  statement  of  the  disputed  points.] 

1.  In  order  to  understand  Paul's  Epistles  to  the  Corinth- 
ians it  is  necessary  to  form  an  adequate  idea  of  the  state  of 
the  Corinthian  community  and  of  its  relations  to  Paul,  a  task 
which  is  made  possible  by  certain  passages  in  the  Acts  !  and 
by  various  allusions  scattered  through  the  Pauline  Epistles. 
On  his  first  journey  to  Europe — probably  in  the  year  53— 
Paul,  after  passing  through  Macedonia  and  Athens,  had 
arrived  at  Corinth,  the  capital  of  Achaia,  a  city  which,  stand- 
ing as  it  did  beside  two  seas,  formed  the  connecting  link  be- 
tween the  commerce  of  the  East  and  of  the  West.  According 
to  2.  i.  19 — words  which  certainly  have  the  appearance  of 
a  later  gloss,  though  their  substance  is  confirmed  by  1.  and  2. 
Thessalonians — Silvanus  and  Timothy  had  helped  him  iii  his 
preaching,  but  even  if  we  do  not  follow  Acts  xviii.  5  in 
assigning  a  later  date  for  their  arrival,  Paul  might  still  con- 
sider himself 2  as  the  true  father,  founder  and  creator  of  the 
Corinthian  church.  It  was  by  his  means  that  the  Gospel 
had  first  been  brought  to  it,3  and  this  is  borne  out  by  the 
fact  that  ihefirstfruits  of  Achaia,  the  house  of  Stephanas4 — 
which  had  deserved  so  well  of  the  Corinthian  Christians — 
were  among  the  few  members  of  the  community  5  baptised  by 
Paul  himself.  '  In  weakness  and  in  fear  ' 6  he  had  entered 
upon  his  work  in  this  strange  city,  and  his  success  was  great 
beyond  his  expectations  7 ;  for  from  the  very  multiplicity  of  the 
factions  that  arose  in  the  new  community  it  is  clear  that  it 
cannot  have  been  a  small  one.  It  was  composed  for  the 
most  part  of  poor  and  uneducated  folk,  many  of  them,  as 
might  be  expected,  slaves  * ;  yet,  as  the  presence  of  individual 
members  of  good  position  may  be  inferred  even  from  this 
passage,  so  the  existence  of  considerable  difference  of  social 
standing  among  the  Corinthian  Christians)  I  follows  from 
xi.  20  fol.  According  to  1.  xii.  2,  theyjhad  formerly  been 
idolaters.  It  does  not  actually  follow  from  1.  vii.  18  that 

1  xviii.  1-18,  27  fol.,  xix.  1,  xx.  2  fol. 

2  1,  iv.  15,  iii.  6-10  ;  2,  xii.  14. 

3  1,  ix.  1,  2  ;  2,  iii.  3.  *  1,  xvi.  15.  •  1,  i.  14-16. 
•  ii.  3.                                        7  1,  i.  4-7.  '  1,  i.  26-29. 


' 


80         AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP. 

there  was  a  small  minority  of  Jews  among  them,  but  in  itse' 
this  is  quite  probable.     The  Jewish  couple,  Aquila  and  Prise 
belonged   for  a   time   to   the  community,  and  their  labo 
for   the   new   creed   among   the   circle   to   which   they   h 
access  are  not  likely  to  have  been  entirely  unavailing. 

In  Acts  xviii.  11,  Paul  is  represented  as  having  devo 
more  than  a  year  and   a   half   to   the  Corinthians,    though 
probably  with  certain  brief  interruptions  during  which  h 
sought  to  win  converts  to  the  new  faith  in  other  districts 
Achaia.2     Nevertheless  the  relations  between  them  were  n 
so  intimate  that  he  would  have  consented  to  accept  suppo 
from  them  as  he  had  from  the  Philippians  :  he  maintain 
himself  while  at  Corinth  by  his   own   labours,"  though   he 
says 4  that  this  reserve  on  his  part  was  not  due  to  any  wanl 
of  love,  but  to  prudence,  that  all  occasion  for  malevolent  sus- 
picion might  be  avoided.     He  had  then  departed  for  a  con 
siderable  time,  and  in  the  interval  a  Jewish  Christian  fro 
Alexandria,  by  name  Apollos,5  had  laboured  for  the  Gospel  a 
Corinth — not  in  antagonism  to  Paul,  but  probably  in  a  mo 
conspicuous  manner,0  for  we  are  told  in  1.  iii.  5-9  that  th 
community  had  been  increased  through  him.     And  notwith 
standing  iii.  10-15  Paul  speaks  of  this  '  brother  '  with  great  re 
spect  again  in  iv.  6  and  xvi.  12,  where  we  learn  that  he  had  le 
Corinth  for  Ephesus  and  had  there  met  Paul,  but  had  not  ye 
at  the  time  when  Paul  wrote,  allowed  himself  to  be  persuad 
to  resume  his  work  among  the  Corinthians.    Through  him  Pa 
had  of  course  obtained  more  recent  news  of  his  old  communit 
over-sea,  and  this  had  again  been  supplemented  a  little  la 
by  the  arrival  of  certain  members  of  the  house  of  Chloe,7  wh 
seem  to  have  removed  from  Corinth  to  Ephesus  ;  but,  besid 
this,  three  members   of   the  community,  Stephanas,  Fortu 
natus  and  Achaicus,  were  at  his  side  while  he  was  writin 
the  First  Epistle,8  men  who  had  apparently  been  deputed 
bear  a  letter  9  from  the  Corinthians  to  their  Apostle,  and  wh 
were   probably   charged   at   the   same   time  with  an  urgent 

1  1,  xvi.  19.  -  1,  i.  1;  2,  i-  l.xi.  10. 

a  1,  iv.  12  ;  ix.  6,  11-15,  18 ;  2,  xi.  7-10.  4  2,  xi.  1'J. 

4  Cf.  Acts  xviii.  24  fol.  "  Cf.  1,  i.  17,  iv.  10 ;  2,  xi.  <>. 
7  1,  i.  11.                           *  xvi.  17  fol.  !1  vii.  i. 


§  7.]  Till-     TWO    Kl'ISTLKS    TO    THN    CORINTHIANS  81 

invitation  to  Paul  and  Apollos  to  renew  their  visits  to 
Corinth.  But  Paul  may  have  heard  much  from  other 
sources  also  as  to  the  state  of  things  at  Corinth,1  for  the 
communication  between  that  city  and  Ephesus  was  frequent 
and  easy.  And  in  vv.  v.  9  and  11  of  the  First  Epistle  we 
hear,  almost  by  chance,  of  an  earlier  letter,  previous  to  1.  Cor- 
inthians, addressed  to  the  community,  in  which  Paul  had 
forbidden  them  to  '  keep  company  with  fornicators ' ;  but 
this  warning  had  been  misunderstood — perhaps  by  design — 
and  taken  as  though  Paul  had  meant  fornicators  among  the 
Gentiles  and  thus  made  an  absolutely  impracticable  demand. 
The  letter  seems  to  have  been  a  short  one,  and  was  certainly 
not  written  without  urgent  need  ;  but  it  has  disappeared, 
together  with  the  above-mentioned  epistle  from  the  Corinth- 
ians, in  which  perhaps  that  foolish  misconstruction  was  pleaded 
as  their  defence. 

2.  Accordingly,  we  shall  not  have  very  far  to  seek  for  the 
causes  which  led  Paul  to  write  the  so-called  First  Epistle  to 
the  Corinthians.  He  had  been  asked  by  the  community  for 
his  pastoral  advice  on  a  series  of  questions  of  morality- 
doubtless  as  to  where  the  Christian  conscience,  for  instance, 
should  draw  the  line  in  the  matter  of  the  relations  between 
the  sexes  ;  how  the  Christian  was  to  judge  concerning  the 
eating  of  meat  sacrificed  to  idols  (slScoXodvrd),  which  had 
been  sold  in  the  market-place  or  set  before  him  at  a  friend's 
table  ;  and  finally  as  to  the  signs  by  which  the  true  presence 
of  the  Spirit  might  be  recognised,  and  as  to  the  best  way  of 
insuring  that  all '  spiritual  gifts,'  the  utterances  of  religious 
enthusiasm,  should  be  given  due  place  and  honour.  Besides 
these,  there  may  have  been  requests  for  information  about 
Apollos  and  the  matter  of  the  Collection.  Perhaps  Paul  was 
merely  asked  to  give  the  messengers  brief  and  verbal  in- 
structions on  these  points ;  but  fortunately  for  us,  Paul 
neither  could  nor  would  settle  questions  of  so  much  import- 
ance with  terse  commands  like  those  of  1.  xvi.  1-4  and  12. 
He  worked  them  out  before  the  inquiring  community,  first  ir 
himself  and  then  in  the  Epistle,  with  all  his  peculiar  energy 
of  religious  thought  and  all  the  delicacy  of  his  moral  sense  ; 

1  1,  v.  1,  xi.  18. 


118 

: 


82        AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT       [CHAP.  i. 

and,  in  spite  of  his  world-contemning  idealism  and  his  attach- 
ment in  principle  to  established  custom,  we  may  well  admire 
his  power  of  avoiding  both  extremes,  and  of  distinguishing 
between  matters  of  universal  and  eternal  value  and  those 
mere  individual  moment. 

But  he  also  gave  his  flock  instructions — and  commands 
for  which  he  had  not  been  expressly  solicited.  As  in  Thessa- 
lonica— though  in  a  different  form -so  in  Corinth,  doubts 
had  been  expressed  as  to  the  possibility  of  a  resurrection  from 
the  dead ;  and  in  many  points,  survivals  of  the  old  heathen 
life,  as  yet  unsubdued,  were  still  manifest.  For  instance,  the 
prosperous  members  of  the  community  fared  sumptuously  at 
the  common  evening  meal,  while  the  needy  went  hungry  ;  so 
little  was  the  idea  of  brotherhood  carried  out  in  practice. 
They  were  not  ashamed  of  carrying  petty  quarrels  between 
members  of  the  Church  before  a  Gentile  tribunal ;  and  one 
man  actually  lived  in  incest  with  his  stepmother,  and  had 
not  yet  been  cast  out  by  the  Church.  In  other  ways  agai] 
their  enthusiasm  passed  the  bounds  of  decency ;  wom< 
wished  to  take  an  active  part  in  the  Church  services,  an< 
appealed  to  the  constraining  force  of  that  Spirit  which  ha( 
been  bestowed  also  upon  them,  and  even  to  the  teaching 
the  Apostle  himself — '  there  is  neither  man  nor  woman,  but 
all  are  one  in  Jesus  Christ.'  They  discarded  the  veil,  which 
was  intended  to  protect  them  from  insult,  at  the  religious 
festivals  ;  and  there  was  some  danger  lest  certain  gifts  of  the 
Spirit,  such  as  speaking  with  tongues  and  prophecy,  should 
be  practised  in  mere  levity  by  men  of  pushing  ambition,  to 
the  detriment  of  true  edification.  And  besides  all  this  the 
Corinthians  were  full  of  self-satisfaction — of  a  vanity  which 
thought  it  could  dispense  with  all  external  guidance.  This 
may  have  become  evident  to  Paul  from  the  community's 
letter,  even  though  we  need  not  actually  believe  that  it 
tried  to  call  Paul  to  account,  used  a  tone  of  disrespect,  or 
was  the  work  of  one  of  his  adversaries ;  but  it  showed  itself 
at  any  rate  with  peculiar  offensiveness  in  an  impertinent 
criticism  of  all  Christian  authorities.  Greek  party-spirit  had 
infected  even  the  young  community,  and  Paul  knew  of  at 
least  four  competing  cliques  in  Corinth,  each  with  its  particular 


§  7.]  THE    TWO    EPISTLES    TO    THE    CORINTHIANS  83 

watchword — and  in  i.  12  he  does  not  even  pretend  to  give  a 
complete  list — ;  they  were  the  partisans  of  Paul,  of  Apollos, 
of  Peter  and  of  Christ.  At  present,  apparently,  this  party- 
spirit  was  mainly  nourished  by  a  love  of  singularity,  for  Paul 
had  not  heard  of  any  serious  religious  differences  among 
them  ;  but  deplorable  results  had  not  failed  to  ensue,  as  each 
faction  could  only  assert  its  own  superiority  at  the  expense  of 
the  leaders  of  the  others,  and  Paul  himself  had  been  subjected 
to  criticism  of  the  most  hostile  kind.1  The  party  of  Apollos 
probably  boasted  of  their  leader's  cleverness  and  skill  in 
argument,  and  no  doubt  it  was  in  opposition  to  them  that  the 
Paulinists  first  arose  ;  another  small  body  again — probably 
composed  of  Jewish  Christians  lately  arrived  there,  for  it  is 
surely  a  bold  assumption  to  say  that  they  consisted  only  of 
wandering  Apostles  from  Palestine — insisted  that  if  an  Apostle 
must  needs  be  their  champion,  it  was  Peter,  the  Pillar  of  the 
Church,  who  should  be  so  regarded. 

By  the  '  party  of  Christ '  we  should  probably  understand 
—  taking  Galatians  into  account — not  the  apostles  of  a  state  of 
independence  unfettered  by  any  traditions,  but  persons  who, 
like  the  '  false  brethren  '  or  the  emissaries  of  James  mentioned 
in  Galatians,2  set  their  claims  still  higher,  and,  since  Peter  did 
not  seem  to  them  infallible  enough,  used  Christ  himself  as 
their  authority,  acknowledging  no  other  law  than  that  which 
they  had  received  from  the  Messiah  in  his  own  lifetime,  or 
that  which  the  glorified  Messiah  had  revealed  to  them.  Verse 
ix.  1  seems  to  be  directed  against  the  party  of  Peter,  for  Paul 
would  not  have  insisted  without  reason  upon  the  facts  that 
he  too  was  an  Apostle,  he  too  had  seen  the  Lord  Jesus ;  and 
xi.  1 — '  be  ye  imitators  of  me,  even  as  I  also  am  of  Christ ' — 
may  be  aimed  against  the  party  of  Christ.  But,  so  far  as 
Paul  knew,  it  had  not  yet  come  to  any  actual  attack  upon  the 
substance  of  his  Gospel,  and  he  looked  upon  the  whole  existence 
of  these  parties  as  stupidity  rather  than  wickedness — an 
attitude  which  would  indeed  be  most  astonishing  if  he  had 
already 'had  bitter  experience  of  the  disturbance  of  his  Galatian 
communities  by  these  apostles  of  Peter  or  of  Christ.  He 
could  still  praise  the  community  for  '  keeping  the  ordinances 

1  i.-iv.  and  ix.  1-13.  2  Gal.  ii.  4, 12. 

G  '2 


84         AX    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT        [CHAP.  I. 

as  I  delivered  them  unto  you.' l  At  present  what  troubled 
him  most  were  the  moral  shortcomings  which  had  arisen 
in  consequence  of  this  factiousness,  and  might  give  the 
enemies  of  the  Gospel  opportunity  for  exultation  and  scoffing. 
But  he  dreads  a  still  more  serious  state  of  things ;  in  iii.  17 
he  already  speaks  of  a  '  destroyer  of  the  temple  of  God,' 
and  it  is  surely  not  without  reference  to  Corinth  that  in 
iii.  10-15  he  dwells  upon  those  who  built  with  worthless 
materials — wood,  hay  and  stubble — upon  the  foundation 
'  Jesus  Christ.'  This  situation  was  grave  enough  in  his  eyes 
to  induce  him — since  he  could  not  immediately  visit  it  in 
person  - — to  make  an  earnest  appeal  to  the  conscience  of  the 
community  by  letter. 

3.  Paul  took  no  trouble  to  weave  the  various  threads  of 
his  Epistle  into  an  artistic  whole,  but  availed  himself  of  the 
freedom  of  style  allowed  in  letter-writing,  and  probably  from 
chaps,  vii.  to  xvi.  followed  the  order,  broadly  speaking,  of 
the  epistle  from  Corinth.  After  the  address  and  greeting 3  and 
the  customary  words  of  thanks,4  he  takes  up  the  subject  of 
the  mischievous  party-spirit 5  of  the  Corinthians  in  a  tone  of 
great  excitement,  which,  however,  gives  place  towards  the 
end  to  words  of  fatherly  exhortation ;  nor  does  the  concluding 
verse — '  What  will  ye?  shall  I  come  unto  you  with  a  rod,  or 
in  love  and  a  spirit  of  meekness  ?  '  -  express  any  rekindling 
of  his  wrath.  Then  in  chaps,  v.  and  vi.  he  pronounces 
a  sentence  of  excommunication  upon  the  fornicators,  and  once 
more  defines  the  attitude  which  it  were  fitting  that  a  Christian 
community  should  take  up  with  regard  to  fornication,  in  the 
midst  of  which  he  inserts  an  appeal r>  to  the  Christian  se: 
of  honour  against  going  to  law  before  a  heathen  judge, 
chap.  vii.  he  answers  the  question  touching  the  relatio 
between  the  sexes,  and  then  that  of  the  difference  betw 
duty  and  expediency,  as  arising  out  of  the  problem  of  mea 
sacrificed  to  idols 7 ;  next  he  combats  the  innovating  spirit  of 
the  women  * ;  and  finally  the  abuses  at  the  celebrations  of  the 
Lord's  Supper.9  The  last  two  passages  are  closely  connected 
with  each  other,  as  they  both  deal  with  offences  against 

1  xi.  2.  -  iv.  IS  fol.  s  i.  1-3. 

4  i.  4-7.  5  i.  10-iv.  21.  vi.  1-11. 

lii.-xi.  1.  "  xi.  -J   li..  "  xi.  17-3J. 


§  7.]  TIIK    TWO    KIMSTI-KS    TO    TI1K    (X)  II I  NT  1 1 1ANS  85 

propriety  at  religious  gatherings.  The  transition  is  easy 
to  chaps,  xii.-xiv.,  in  which  *  spiritual  gifts '  are  judged 
according  to  a  standard  which  the  lofty  utterance  of  chap, 
xiii. — a  Canticle,  as  it  were,  in  praise  of  love — expresses  in 
so  exalted  a  way.  In  chap.  xv.  he  lays  down  and  defends  a 
part  of  his  Gospel  not  generally  understood  at  Corinth — the 
certainty  of  a  resurrection  from  the  dead,  as  the  necessary 
consequence  of  the  rising  again  of  Jesus.  Finally,  in 
chap.  xvi.  there  are  directions  as  to  the  mode  of  gathering 
the  collection  for  the  poor  ;  plans  of  travel ;  information  as 
to  the  approaching  visit  of  Timothy  ;  all  winding  up  with 
advice  after  the  manner  of  1.  Thessalonians  v.,1  with  greetings, 
and  a  conclusion  from  Paul's  own  hand. 

Here  it  might  be  well  to  say  that  the  idea  of  1.  Corinthians 
being  a  mere  conglomerate  of  disjointed  utterances  upon  the 
most  various  subjects  should  be  absolutely  rejected.  The  ques- 
tion of  incest  and  fornication,2  for  instance,  had  been  led  up  to 
by  the  emphasising  of  Paul's  paternal  right  of  chastisement : 
here  was  a  case  in  which  strict  chastisement  was  a  duty  ; 
in  chap,  vi.,  again,  we  have  the  discussion  upon  judging, 
because  in  v.  12  Paul  had  exhorted  his  readers  to  exercise 
judgment,  while  chap.  vii.  is  also  the  natural  development  of 
the  ethical  problems  touched  upon  in  v.  and  vi. 

4.  Nothing  can  be  gathered  from  the  address  as  to  the 
circumstances  under  which  the  Epistle  was  written.  Paul's 
coadjutor  in  the  task,  Sosthenes,  who  can  scarcely  be  identified 
with  the  '  ruler  of  the  Synagogue '  of  Acts  xviii.  17,  is  other- 
wise unknown  to  us  ;  he  must  have  been  one  of  Paul's 
helpers,  who  possessed  probably  the  same  sort  of  authority 
with  the  Corinthians,  and  for  the  same  reasons,  as  Timothy 
or  Silvanus.  The  latter  we  do  not  find  in  Paul's  vicinity  after 
the  period  of  activity  in  Corinth,  and  Timothy  had  already 
been  sent  by  Paul  to  Corinth,3  probably  before  the  letter 
from  the  Corinthians  had  reached  its  destination.  He  was 
to  return,  according  to  Paul's  wish,  straight  to  him  from 
Corinth ;  but  probably  he  had  had  other  tasks  to  discharge 
as  well,  and  had  gone  to  Achaia  by  way  of  Macedonia,  so  that 
Paul's  Epistle,  though  despatched  later,  may  have  arrived  in 
Corinth  earlier  than  he.  It  was  entrusted,  we  may  suppose 

1  Vv.  12,  13.  2  Chaps,  v.  and  vi.  3  iv.  17,  xvi.  10  fol 


*"to 

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86        AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT       [CHAP.  I. 

to  the  three  representatives  of  the  community  who  had 
delivered  the  Corinthians'  epistle  into  Paul's  hands,  and  these 
would  have  performed  both  journeys  by  the  shortest  route,  i.e. 
by  sea.  The  Epistle  was  written  from  Ephesus,1  where  Paul 
was  surrounded  by  a  considerable  staff  of  brethren,2  including 
Apollos.  He  can  send  greetings  from  the  Churches  of  Asia,3 
and  must  therefore  have  been  working  in  the  district  for  some 
time  4 ;  while  according  to  xv.  32,  where  he  speaks  of  fighting 
with  wild  beasts,  he  had  already  experienced  persecution 
Ephesus  ;  a  few  years  also  seem  to  have  elapsed  since 
departure  from  Corinth,5  and  there  is  nothing  to  indicate  that 
since  his  foundation  of  the  community  Paul  had  paid  it 
another  visit — in  fact  verse  ix.  18  almost  excludes  the  possi- 
bility. And  since  he  speaks  of  a  possible  wintering  at  Corinth,6 
and  intends  to  make  the  Jewish  feast  of  Pentecost  the  latter 
limit  of  his  stay  in  Ephesus,  the  Epistle  must  have  been 
written  in  the  spring.  If  we  were  quite  sure  that  Pa 
kept  to  the  plan  of  operations  outlined  in  xvi.  1,  3  and  5, 
should  certainly  be  obliged  to  assign  1.  Corinthians  to  the  end 
of  his  sojourn  at  Ephesus,  and  in  that  case  scarcely  enou 
space  would  be  left  for  Galatians  between  the  despatch 
1.  Corinthians  and  Paul's  hasty  departure.  But  Paul  altered 
his  plans  of  travel  again  and  again — sometimes  of  his  own 
accord  and  sometimes  of  necessity  (as  indeed  in  Ephesus 
itself,  according  to  Acts  xix.  10,  not  long  afterwards) — and 
thus  the  arguments  brought  forward  on  p.  76  still  hold  go 
and  1.  Corinthians  may  be  assigned  with  much  probability 
the  year  56. 

5.  The  other  Epistle  of  Paul  to  the  Corinthian  comrnuni 
that  we  still  possess — it  is  about  two-thirds  the  length  of  the 
First,  and  even  more  clearly  than  the  First  includes  withi 
its  scope  the  Christians  scattered  through  Achaia — is  them 
problematical  of  all  the  Pauline  Epistles.     Its  arrangeme: 
is  in  some  respects  exceedingly  simple,  in  others  all  but  inexpli 
able.     The  three  main  divisions,  chapters  i.-vii.,  viii.-ix.,  and 
x.-xiii.,  are  marked  off  unmistakably  from  one  another,  even 

1  xvi.  8.  2  xvi.  20,  and  cf.  Gal. 

3  xvi.  19.  4  Cf.  verse  9. 

»  Acts  xviii.  18,  and  cf.  1.  Cor.  iv.  18.  6  xvi.  6. 


S 

ity 


§7.]  Till:    TWO    EPISTLES   TO   THE    CORINTHIANS  87 

by  their  tone.  The  smaller  middle  part  deals  entirely  with 
the  matter  of  the  Collection.  Here  the  Apostle  seeks  to 
stimulate  the  zeal  of  those  he  is  addressing  both  with 
earnestness  and  love  ;  but,  though  the  matter  is  so  dear  to  his 
own  heart,  he  is  not  sure  of  its  reception  by  the  Corinthians, 
and  hence  arise  the  numerous  repetitions  and  occasionally 
turgid  sentences.  The  difficulty  of  making  a  clear  translation 
of  these  chapters,  in  spite  of  their  exceedingly  simple  subject- 
matter,  is  due  to  this  condition  of  embarrassment  under 
which  they  were  penned.  Then,  however,  with  the  abruptest 
change  of  front,  Paul  turns  from  chap.  x.  onwards  to 
defending  himself  against  certain  persons  at  Corinth  who 
had  sought  to  vindicate  their  disobedience  by  the  most 
malignant  slander.  Their  accusations  are  set  forth  with  a 
running  commentary  in  chap.  x. ;  in  xi.  1-15  Paul  proceeds 
to  a  vehement  attack  upon  these  deceitful  false  apostles,  and 
further  1  draws  a  comparison  remarkable  for  its  bitter 
irony  as  well  as  for  its  moving  pathos  between  his  own 
promises  and  performance  and  theirs ;  however  painful  such 
boasting  may  be  to  him,  he  dare  not  injure  his  cause  out  of 
false  modesty.  Finally,  he  implores  his  readers  in  a  some- 
what quieter  tone  2  to  settle  their  most  serious  differences 
and  complete  the  victory  of  truth  before  his  approaching  third 
visit  to  Corinth.  The  abruptness  of  the  three  concluding 
verses,  xiii.  11-13,  is  especially  remarkable  when  contrasted 
with  their  parallels  in  the  First  Epistle.3 

In  the  first  part,  however  (chaps,  i.-vii.),  which  of  course 
begins  with  address  and  greeting,  Paul  passes  by  an  almost  im- 
perceptible transition  from  his  thanksgiving  to  a  description  of 
his  recent  sad  experiences  and  to  a  discussion  of  the  differences 
subsisting  between  himself  and  the  Corinthians.  He  first  blesses 
God 4  for  the  consolation  —to  which  the  Corinthians  themselves 
had  contributed  by  their  sympathetic  prayers  on  his  behalf — 
granted  him  for  the  terrible  experiences  he  had  undergone 
in  Asia.  He  had  almost  ceased  to  count  upon  their  sympathy, 
and  the  fear  of  losing  their  hearts  had  tortured  him  more 
during  those  dark  days  than  all  his  external  calamities.  How 

1  xi.  16-xii.  18.  -  xii.  19-xiii.  10. 

3  1,  xvi.  13-24.  4  i.  3-11. 


88         AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT        [CHAP.  i. 

deeply  the  confidence  between  the  Apostle  and  the  community 
had  been  shaken  can  be  seen  from  vv.  i.  11,  12,  17,  where 
Paul  defends  himself  against  the  charges  of  insincerity  and 
untrustworthiness  that  had  been  brought  against  him.  He 
had  only  given  up  his  promised  visit  to  Corinth,  he  declares, 
out  of  forbearance  towards  the  community,  and  because  the 
letter  he  wrote  them  in  its  stead  had  had  the  desired  effect, 
since  the  community  had  corrected  the  man  who  had  sinned 
against  him.  Now,  however,  after  punishment,  they  were 
free  to  forgive  him.  He,  Paul,  had  not  been  seeking  his  own 
honour  in  the  whole  affair,  but  had  let  himself  be  guided  by 
his  love  for  the  Corinthians,  which  had  driven  him  irresistibly 
towards  them,  even  from  his  fruitful  field  of  work  in  the 
Troad.  Then,  with  true  loftiness  of  tone,  he  continues  his 
defence l  against  the  charge  of  vain  and  conceited  arrogance, 
in  such  a  manner  that  the  sublime  truth  and  force  of  his 
gospel  are  set  before  the  very  eyes  of  his  readers.2  He 
declares  himself  the  Apostle  of  the  new  covenant,  the  covenant 
of  the  Spirit,  of  freedom  and  of  glory  ;  he  dwells  upon  the 
fact  that  all  his  trouble  and  weakness  have  only  increased  in 
him  the  certainty  of  eternal  life  and  the  longing  for  home, 
together  with  the  overwhelming  power  of  the  Holy  Spirit,"  and 
he  insists  that  his  labours  have  been  solely  devoted  to  the 
reconciliation  of  mankind  with  God,  and  the  founding  of 
new  creation.'  Upon  this  follows,  by  way  of  epilogue,  an 
earnest  exhortation  to  his  readers  to  show  forth  this  newnes 
in  their  conduct— a  newness  having  no  further  connection 
with  the  old  life5 — and  finally  a  hearty  expression  of  his 
restored  confidence  towards  them  ;  for  the  good  news  which 
Titus  had  brought  with  him  of  the  repentance  of  the  Corinth- 
ians had  comforted  his  mind  and  confirmed  him  mos 
joyfully  in  his  ancient  good  opinion  of  their  disposition. 

2.  Corinthians  is,  strictly  speaking,  the  most  personal  o 
the  extant  Epistles  of  Paul.     Apart  from  its  business  discus- 
sions it  is  entirely  occupied  with  self-defence  and  controversy  ; 
but  yet   no  other  is  richer  in   profound   teaching  as  to  the 
foundation,  the   aims  and  moral  effects  of  his  gospel ;  tho 

1  From  chapter  iii.  onwards.  *  iii.  1-iv.  0. 

3  iv.  7-v.  10.  '  v.  11-- vi.  10.  5  vi.  11-vii.  1. 


§  7.]  THE    TWO    KP1STLKS    TO    THti    CORINTHIANS  89 

individuality  of  the  Apostle  shows  itself  here  in  its  most  many- 
sided  form  :  in  all  its  burning  love,  its  bitter  wrath,  its  con- 
siderate wisdom  in  the  direction  of  earthly  affairs,  and  its  all- 
forgetting  absorption  in  the  mysteries  of  the  other  world. 
Above  all,  we  are  left  with  the  impression  that  this  man  and 
his  religion  are  one. 

6.  The  circumstances  under  which  the  Epistle  was  com- 
posed appear  at  first  sight  to  be  easily  ascertainable.  Paul 
had  been  forced  to  leave  Asia,  i.e.  Ephesus,  under  imminent 
danger  of  death,  and  had  then  turned  his  steps  northwards, 
waiting  awhile  in  Troas  for  the  return  of  Titus,  whom  he 
had  sent  to  Corinth,  but  finally  going  on  to  meet  the  latter  in 
Macedonia.1  Here  he  had  happily  fallen  in  with  him  and 
had  received  the  most  cheering  reports  of  Corinth  from  his 
lips.2  At  the  moment  of  writing  he  was  gathering  in  the 
money  collected  in  Macedonia — to  which  he  hopes  consider- 
able additions  may  be  made  in  Corinth " — and  was  intending 
to  reach  that  city  shortly,  accompanied  by  certain  Macedonian 
Christians,4  there  to  receive  the  sums  his  readers  had  col- 
lected. In  order  to  encourage  the  energetic  prosecution  of 
this  Collection  he  had  sent  a  few  trusted  friends  before  him  to 
Corinth,  with  Titus  again  at  their  head,5  and  these  had  probably 
taken  charge  of  his  Epistle,  which  he  had  written  in  haste  at 
their  urgent  request.  He  mentions  his  approaching  visit  again 
a  little  further  on.6  His  companion  in  writing  the  Epistle  was 
Timothy,  whom  according  to  Acts  xix.  22  he  had  sent  into 
Macedonia  before  his  own  departure  from  Ephesus.  All  this 
agrees  admirably  with  the  situation  described  in  Acts  xx.  2 ; 
the  Epistle  was  written  a  few  weeks  or  months  before  Paul's 
last  appearance  in  Corinth,  whence,  it  will  be  remembered, 
he  started  on  his  circuitous 7  journey  to  Jerusalem,  gather- 
ing in  contributions  to  the  Collection  on  his  way — the  last 
journey  that  he  was  destined  to  undertake  as  a  free  man. 
2.  Corinthians  must,  then,  be  assigned  to  a  date  some  nine 
months  previous  to  his  arrest :  that  is,  in  the  autumn  of  the 
year  57. 

1  i.  8-10 ;  ii.  12  fol.  '2  vii.  5-7.  :i  viii.  0  fol. 

4  ix.  4.  *  viii.  6,  16-24,  ix.  3-5. 

6  xii.  14,  20.  foL,  xiii.  1  fol.  and  10.  7  Acts  xx.  3  fol. 


90        AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT       [CHAP.  i. 

7.  It  is  also  easy  to  give  a  general  answer  to  the  question 
of  the  occasion  or  object  of  the  Epistle.  Paul  had  just 
received  unequivocal  proof  from  Titus  that  the  majority  of 
the  Corinthian  Christians  recognised  Paul's  rank  as  an 
Apostle,  and  his  right  to  be  regarded  by  them  as  a  father,  and 
that  they  regretted  all  expressions  to  the  contrary.  Paul 
now  assures  them  in  the  warmest  way  that  his  feelings  were 
the  same,  and  that  he  bore  them  a  love  which  took  thought  only 
for  their  welfare.  This  alone  would  have  been  too  much  to 
entrust  to  a  verbal  message,  but  he  was  besides  extremely 
anxious  to  stimulate  the  ardour  of  the  Achaians  in  the  matter 
of  the  Collection,  and,  above  all,  he  had  to  settle  his  account 
with  that  small  body  of  implacable  opponents  who  were  still 
carrying  on  their  agitations  in  Corinth.  By  refuting  each  of 
their  charges  separately  he  must  prevent  any  repetition  of  a 
situation  put  an  end  to  with  so  much  difficulty,  in  which  a 
community  assumed  the  position  of  judge  over  its  own  Apostle, 
putting  him  as  it  were  on  trial. 

But  many  difficulties  present  themselves  as  soon  as  we 
attempt  to  distinguish  clearly  the  lines  of  connection  between 
the  First  and  Second  Epistles,  and  to  investigate  more 
minutely  what  had  actually  passed  between  Paul  and  the 
Corinthian  Church  to  make  the  explanations  of  the  Second 
Epistle  necessary.  Nor  is  there  anything  else  within  the 
limits  of  our  subject  which  has  called  forth  so  bewildering  a 
variety  of  attempts  at  solution  as  have  these  questions.  It  is 
bad  enough,  to  begin  with,  that  it  should  be  thought  necessary 
or  possible  to  solve  them  all.  Two  facts,  however,  are  placed 
beyond  all  doubt :  first,  that  the  Second  Epistle  was  written 
later  than  the  First,  for  the  party  divisions  treated  in  the  First 
jis  relatively  harmless  appear  from  the  Second  to  have  well- 
nigh  severed  the  bond  between  Paul  and  the  Corinthians.  It 
is  true  that  we  hear  nothing  more  of  the  earlier  party  names, 
of  the  factions  of  Apollos,  Peter,  and  Paul,  but  the  opposition 
of  the  *  party  of  Christ,'  supported  from  outside,1  had  proved 
to  be  all  the  more  formidable ;  it  was  more  dangerous  even 
than  the  Judaistic  movement  in  Galatia,  for  its  leaders  did 
not  come  forward  with  the  special  demands  of  Judaism, 

1   iii.  1,  x.  12,  18,  xi.  4. 


§  7.]  THE   TWO    EPISTLES   TO   THE    CORINTHIANS  91 

but  merely  strove  to  drive  the  hated  Paul  out  of  Corinth  by 
means  of  a  campaign  of  slander.  He  was  a  braggart,  it  was 
said  ;  he  '  walked  in  the  flesh ' ;  he  lacked  the  calling  and 
power  of  an  Apostle,  and  played  the  Evangelist  out  of  greed. 
The  other  fact  is  equally  indisputable — that  before  this 
Epistle  Paul  had  addressed  yet  another,  of  which  we  now  hear 
for  the  first  time,  to  the  Corinthians.1  This  last  had  been 
written  '  out  of  much  anguish  of  heart  with  many  tears  '  and 
with  the  object  of  calling  forth  the  sorrow  and  repentance  of  his 
readers.  He  had  demanded  satisfaction  in  it  for  an  insult 
offered  him  by  an  unnamed  member  of  the  community.2 
Subsequently  he  had  become  extremely  uneasy  as  to  the  effect 
which  his  very  imperious3  communication  might  have  had 
upon  its  readers 4 ;  but  at  last  Titus  arrived  with  the  news  of 
a  happy  result ft ;  the  great  majority  of  the  Corinthians  had 
punished  the  offender,6  and  had  declared  their  loyalty  to  Paul. 
With  great  joy  he  welcomes  their  surrender — which,  by  the 
way,  according  to  vii.  7,  they  could  hardly  have  expressed  to 
him  by  letter — and  now  he  asks  them  himself  to  pardon  the 
wrong-doer  and  to  consider  the  affair  at  an  end.  To  identify 
this  offender  (aS^aas-) — who  had  not,  as  Paul  insists,  caused 
him  personal  sorrow 7 — with  the  incestuous  person  of  1.  v.  would 
be  almost  as  monstrous,  when  we  consider  the  mildness  with 
which  Paul  treats  him,  as  to  identify  the  First  Epistle,  or 
even  the  epistle  mentioned  in  1.  v.  9,  with  the  stern  letter 
described  in  the  Second.  There  is  nothing  in  the  First  Epistle 
which  corresponds  to  what  we  must  needs  imagine  as  the 
contents  of  the  letter  '  written  with  many  tears  ' ;  and  it  is  im- 
possible that  Paul  should  suddenly  have  become  uneasy,  a  year 
or  two  after,  as  to  the  effect  which  a  letter  written  before  1.  and 
answered  by  the  community  with  perfect  calmness  before  1., 
might  have  had.  I  am  unable  to  discover  in  1.  Corinthians 
this  mighty  wrath  flashing  out  at  all  points,  this  forced  calm 
which  wrung  tears  from  Paul's  deeply  sensitive  nature,  this 
most  bitter  pain ;  and  if  the  First  Epistle  were  written  '  in 
heaviness,'  what  epithet  must  we  apply  to  the  Second,  which, 
though  written  in  joy,  has  its  real  outbreaks  of  fierce  anger  ? 

1  ii.  3,  4,  9,  vii.  7-12.  -  ii.  5,  vii.  12.  3  x.  9-11. 

4  ii.  13,  vii.  5.  5  Ch.  vii.  6  ii.  5  fol.,  vii.  11.  7  ii.  5. 


92        AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT       [CHAP.  i. 

Of  course  a  spirit  of  determined  malignity  might  so  distort 
even  an  epistle  which,  like  1.  Corinthians,  says  so  much 
that  is  loving  and  good  of  its  recipients,  that  its  pages  might 
appear  to  teem  with  insults,  but  even  if  we  do  attribute 
such  malice  to  the  Corinthians,  it  would  still  be  strange 
that,  though  Paul  had  immediately  had  pricks  of  conscience 
on  account  of  this  very  moderately  written  Epistle,  he  should 
within  a  few  months  afterwards  have  ventured  to  address  a 
document  so  far  more  violent  as  was  the  Second  Epistle  to  the 
same  newly  pacified  community.  It  is  not  so  bad,  however, 
to  ascribe  to  him  this  act  of  folly  as  to  hold  him  capable  of 
a  shuffling  diplomacy  dictated  by  boundless  opportunism,  of 
assuming  an  air  of  indifference  in  the  Second  Epistle  1  towards 
the  incestuous  person  of  the  First  - — of  saying  he  had  merely 
wished  to  test  the  obedience  of  the  community  and  its  zeal  on 
his  behalf — merely  because  his  judgment  of  the  offender  in 
the  earlier  Epistle  had  not  given  satisfaction. 

No,  between  the  First  and  Second,  Paul  had  had  an 
extremely  painful  dispute  with  the  Corinthians,  and  between 
these  two,  as  well  as  before  the  First,  an  epistle  ivas  sent  by 
Paul  to  the  Corinthian  Church  'which  has  not  found  its  way 
into  the  Canon.  The  self-esteem  of  the  community  was  no 
doubt  very  early  concerned  in  the  suppression  of  both  these 
documents,  which  were  not  exactly  flattering  to  their  recipients, 
and  probably  only  possessed  a  temporary  value.  And  in  the 
case  of  the  second  this  would  doubtless  have  been  the  wish  of 
Paul  himself.  But  where  and  how  did  this  offence  against 
the  Apostle  on  the  part  of  a  Corinthian  Christian  take  place  ? 
What  the  wrong  consisted  in  does  not  interest  us  so  much  ;  it 
was  of  course  connected  with  the  movement  of  personal 
persecution  which  had  soon  envenomed  the  party  spirit  of  the 
city ;  and  we  know  already  what  unworthy  things  were 
publicly  said  there,  by  the  *  party  of  Christ,'  about  the  de- 
tested Paul.3  In  this  case  we  must  assume  that  the  attacks 
had  taken  a  peculiarly  coarse  and  insolent  form.  But  if  only 
we  knew  whether  Paul  had  experienced  them  in  person,  or 
had  merely  heard  of  them  from  others  !  In  the  former  case 
we  must  assume  a  visit  of  the  Apostle  to  Corinth  which 

1  Chs.  ii.  and  vii.  -  Ch.  v.  3  x.  7,  xi.  13,  23. 


§  7.]  T1IK    TWO    Kl'ISTLES   TO    TUK    ('( H1INTH  IA.NS  93 

the  Acts  do  not  mention,  and,  moreover,  one  which  took 
place  after  the  •  writing  of  the  First  Epistle ;  for  that 
letter  refers  only  to  Paul's  earliest  pioneering  labours  in 
Achaia.  In  spite  of  the  silence  of  the  Acts  indeed,  we  are 
forced  to  recognise  three  sojourns  of  the  Apostle  in  Corinth, 
by  Paul's  own  plain  statements  in  2.  xii.  14  and  xiii.  1, 
according  to  which  his  approaching  visit  would  be  the  third. 
Besides  these  statements,  the  words  of  2.  ii.  1  can  only  be 
understood  to  refer  to  a  second  visit  which  Paul  looks 
back  upon  with  horror  ;  and  if  it  was  one  performed  *  in 
heaviness,'  the  experience  denoted  by  the  same  expression  in 
2.  ii.  5,  may  very  well  have  occurred  during  its  course.  Such 
a  visit,  with  results  unsatisfactory  to  Paul,  we  should  also 
infer — although  without  his  direct  testimony — from  the  words 
of  x.  1,  10  and  xi.  21,  for  it  could  not  have  been  in  reference 
to  his  first  brilliant  activity  in  Corinth  that  his  opponents 
would  have  pointed  to  the  contrast  between  the  '  weightiness' 
of  his  Epistles  and  the  '  weakness  of  his  bodily  presence.' 
i.  15  l  is  no  argument  to  the  contrary,  for  Paul's  abandoned 
purpose  was,  not  to  give  the  Corinthians  the  benefit  of  a 
second  visit,  but  to  combine  his  journeys  to  Achaia  and 
Macedonia  in  such  a  way  that  Corinth  might  twice  receive 
the  blessing  of  his  presence.  This  plan,  moreover,  which 
certainly  does  not  correspond  with  that  of  1.  xvi.  5,  might 
just  as  well  have  held  the  field  for  a  time  after  the  despatch 
of  1.  Corinthians  as  before  it. 

Thus  the  course  of  affairs  between  the  First  and  Second 
Epistles  may  be  imagined  as  something  like  this :  the 
First  Epistle  had  had  no  effect  in  Corinth  on  the  party 
divisions,  and  Timothy  would  have  informed  Paul  on  his 
return  thence  that  the  anti-Pauline  agitation,  grasping  at 
every  pretext,  had  made  formidable  progress  and  that  he  had 
stood  perplexed  and  impotent  before  it.  This  was  the  reason 
why  Timothy  was  not  made  use  of  again  for  missionary  work 
in  Corinth.  Paul,  however,  believed  that  he  himself  would 
produce  a  greater  effect,  and  sailed  across  the  short  stretch 

1  '  And  in  this  confidence  I  was  minded  to  come  unto  you  before,  that  ye 
might  have  a  second  benefit :  and  by  you  to  pass  into  Macedonia,  and  again 
from  Macedonia  to  come  unto  you.' 


94        AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT       [CHAP.  i. 

from  Ephesus  to  Achaia,  perhaps  without  warning ;  but  he 
failed  to  strike  the  right  note,  had  to  put  up  with  a  personal 
insult  from  one  of  the  members  of  the  community,  and  very 
soon  travelled  back  again,  grieved  to  the  heart,  and,  in  the 
opinion  of  his  opponents,  completely  driven  off  the  field.  He 
may  have  waited  in  vain  for  some  time  for  some  intimation 
of  repentance  on  the  part  of  his  Corinthian  children  ;  later 
tidings  were  probably  highly  unsatisfactory,  and  he  then 
wrote  that  third  letter  in  which  he  sharply  lashed  the 
ingratitude,  disobedience  and  immorality  of  the  Corinthians 
and  offered  them  a  choice  between  submission  l  and  a  final 
rupture.  The  delicate  task  of  conveying  this  letter  and 
afterwards  of  bringing  those  to  whom  it  was  addressed  into  a 
responsive  frame  of  mind,  he  entrusted  to  Titus,  who  was  as 
yet  unknown  to  the  Corinthians.2  The  results  of  this  man's 
judicious  and  energetic  proceedings  ;?  were  that  the  greater 
part  of  the  community  :  complied  with  Paul's  demands— 
which  are  unknown  to  us  in  detail — and  repelled  the 
calumnies  of  the  '  followers  of  Christ,'  while  Titus  could  even 
successfully  introduce  the  matter  of  the  Collection  without 
further  delay/' 

Of  course  he  did  not  accomplish  all  this  in  a  day,  and  his 
stay  in  Corinth  was  prolonged  beyond  his  expectation.  When 
he  had  started  on  his  journey  Paul  was  still  at  Ephesus,  but 
was  intending  to  depart  shortly  and  to  go  through  the 
Troad  to  Macedonia ;  his  route  having  been  arranged  so 
accurately  with  Titus  beforehand  that  the  latter  could  not 
fail  to  meet  the  Apostle  at  some  point  on  his  return  from 
Corinth.  The  earlier  plans  announced  by  Paul  in  i.  15, 
however,  according  to  which  he  thought  of  going  from  Asia 
through  Corinth  to  Macedonia  and  from  there  back  again  to 
Corinth,  cannot  in  this  case  have  been  communicated  to  the 
Corinthians  by  Titus  or  by  the  intermediate  epistle,  for  that 
epistle  had  probably  served  as  a  substitute  for  the  first  of 
these  two  visits ;  and  we  know  that  complaints  of  the 
Apostle's  vacillation  had  already  been  made  to  Titus/5  Paul 
had  rather  promised  something  of  this  kind  to  the  Corinthians 

1  2,  ii.  9,  x.  6.  •  2,  vii.  14.  »  vii.  15. 

4  ii.  5  fol.  *  viii.  6.  •  i.  13,  15  fol. 


§  7.]  THE   TWO   EPISTLES   TO   THE    CORINTHIANS  95 

during  his  second  visit,  or  through  some  intermediate  channel 
at  the  time  of  it.  That  he  had  formed  exactly  the  same 
plans  in  the  First  Epistle l  as  we  may  gather  from  the 
Second 2  that  he  actually  carried  out  at  last  is  a  mere  coinci- 
dence :  he  was  forced  by  the  stress  of  circumstances  to  revert 
to  the  original  plan  of  1.  xvi.  in  spite  of  a  more  recently 
arranged  modification  intended  especially  for  the  advantage 
of  Corinth.  This  modification  was  of  later  date  than  1.  xvi., 
for  according  to  2.  ii.  1  Paul  would  have  kept  to  it  had  not 
his  determination  not  to  visit  Corinth  again  in  heaviness, 
but  to  wait  for  her  submission,  obliged  him  to  make  a  direct 
journey  to  Macedonia.  The  most  probable  hypothesis  is 
that  in  bidding  farewell  to  his  friends  after  his  prematurely 
curtailed  second  visit  he  had  promised  them  compensation  in 
the  form  of  two  visits  at  a  later  time.  And  we  know  also 
from  Acts  xx.  3,  that  Paul  was  again  unable  to  perform  the 
Collection  journey  to  Jerusalem  direct  from  Corinth  by  sea, 
as  he  had  desired,  but  that  he  first  travelled  northwards  once 
more  to  Macedonia  and  then  along  the  eastern  side  of  the 
^Egean  Sea  southwards  to  Palestine. 

If  we  consider  the  multitude  of  events  which  would  thus 
have  taken  place  between  1.  and  2.  Corinthians,  we  must 
divide  the  two  Epistles  from  one  another  by  about  a  year  and 
a  half,  and  if  1.  was  written  in  the  spring  of  56,  2.  must  be 
assigned  to  the  autumn  of  57,  and  so  on;  for  only  thus 
would  there  be  time  for  the  intermediate  visit  and  letter  and 
the  long  interval  of  waiting.  It  is  true  that  Paul  could,  not 
in  this  case  have  left  Ephesus  at  Pentecost  in  the  same  year 
in  which  he  wrote  the  words  of  1.  xvi.  8,  but  must  have 
extended  his  activity  there  for  another  twelve  months ;  but 
this  is  attested  by  his  own  words  in  2.  viii.  10  and  ix.  2, 
where  we  hear  that  the  Corinthians  had  shown  goodwill 
towards  the  matter  of  the  Collection  since  the  previous  year 
(a-jro  irspvo-i}.  But  the  starting-point  of  their  goodwill,  in 
spite  of  the  agreement  between  viii.  10  and  viii.  6  (TT/OO- 
svdp^sa-Oai)  could  not  have  been  the  appearance  of  Titus,  but 
the  zeal  of  the  Corinthians  for  the  Collection  attested  in  or 
aroused  by  the  words  of  1.  xvi.  1. 

1  xvi.  5  fol.  -  2,  i.  23,  ii.  1,  12  fol.,  ix.  5. 


96        AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT        [CHAP.  i. 

8.  Just  as  the  Church  could  not  admit  that  at  least  one 
Epistle  of  Paul's  to  Corinth  and  another  addressed  to  him 
thence  had  disappeared — and  therefore  attempted  to  make  up 
for  them  by  a  forged  correspondence,  which,  arising  out  of 
the  '  Acts  of  Paul,'  was  preserved  both  in  Latin  and 
Armenian  and  enjoyed  full  recognition  in  the  Armenian 
Bible  for  1000  years — so  modern  criticism  thinks  itself 
bound  to  discover  considerable  portions  at  least  of  the  lost 
epistles  to  the  Corinthians  within  the  limits  of  the  canonical 
pair.  The  most  recent  critics  have  set  themselves  to  this 
productive  task  with  amazing  energy,  contending,  for  in- 
stance, that  relics  of  the  earliest  Corinthian  Epistle  are  to  be 
found  in  several  passages  scattered  through  what  is  now  the 
First,1  and,  naturally,  this  has  not  been  accomplished  with- 
out once  more  attacking  the  genuineness  of  individual 
sentences.  An  hypothesis  which  assumes  that  the  passage 
vi.  14  to  vii.  1  of  the  Second  Epistle  is  such  a  relic  has 
indeed  gained  the  approval  of  a  much  wider  circle.  Here 
the  admission  that  there  are  at  any  rate  no  grounds  for 
regarding  these  verses  as  non-Pauline  is  satisfactory ;  a  few 
a-Traf  \sy6jjLsva  of  the  sort  contained  in  the  paragraph — 
£T£po£vysLV,  BsX/ap,  /zero^r/,  o-vfjufxDvrio-is,  o-vyKardOscris, 
p,o\v(Tfjb6$ — are  of  no  importance,  especially  in  an  epistle  so 
rich  in  peculiarities  as  2.  Corinthians,  while  the  use  of  adp% 
in  the  sense  of  '  the  outer  man '  in  vii.  1  has  good  parallels 
elsewhere.2  Nor  are  the  tone  and  ideas  by  any  means 
un-Pauline.  On  the  other  hand,  it  will  not  be  denied  that 
the  context  would  not  suffer  by  the  rejection  of  these  verses ; 
vii.  2  would  follow  excellently  upon  vi.  13,  and  the  rejected 
passage  would  be  perfectly  appropriate  in  a  letter  such  as 
that  described  in  1.  v.  9-13.  But  what  is  most  convenient  is 
not  necessarily  right ;  it  is  not  impossible  that  vi.  14  fol. 
should  follow  upon  vi.  12  and  13  any  more  than  that  vii.  2  fol. 
should  follow  upon  vii.  1.  The  entreaty  to  break  with 
unbelief  and  all  its  works  is  fully  prepared  for,  for  instance, 

1  E.g.,  Hi.  10-23,  vii.  17-24,  ix.  1-x.  22,  x.  25-30,  xii.  20  fol.,  xiv.  336-3(;, 
xv.  1-55  and  67  foi. 

-  iii.  3,  iv.  10  12,  v.  10;  Gal.  iv.  13;  and  compare  especially  the  'relief 
for  our  spirit '  of  2.  ii.  13  and  the  '  relief  of  our  flesh '  of  2,  vii.  5. 


§  7.]  THE   TWO   EPISTLES   TO   THE    CORINTHIANS  97 

by  v.  10  and  vi.  1  and  2,  and  the  somewhat  violent  transition 
to  this  fundamental  moral  demand  may  be  psychologically 
explained  by  the  Apostle's  anxiety  lest  in  this  letter,  occupied 
as  it  was  with  assurances  of  friendship,  self -justification  and 
efforts  for  the  Collection,  the  most  important  point— the 
edification  of  a  community  little  accustomed  as  yet  to 
'walking  in  the  Spirit,'  but  rather  in  need  of  a  strict 
discipline — should  not  be  sufficiently  emphasised. 

Almost  more  misleading  than  this  suggestion  about  2.  vi. 
14  and  the  following  verses  is  the  so-called  hypothesis  of  the 
Four  Chapter  Epistle,  which  was  first  put  forward  by  A. 
Hausrath.  According  to  this  theory,  chaps,  x.-xiii.  are  to  be 
severed  from  chaps,  i.-ix.  in  the  form  of  a  separate  epistle, 
and  are  to  represent  that  intermediate  letter  mentioned 
in  chaps,  ii.  and  vii.  ;  it  can  scarcely  be  disputed,  indeed,  that 
chaps,  i.-ix.  as  well  as  x.-xiii.  could  each  constitute  a  com- 
plete epistle  in  themselves — except  that  the  ending  of  the  one 
(and  might  not  ix.  15  perhaps  be  sufficient  ending?)  and 
the  address  of  the  other  had  been  struck  out — and  the 
vehemence  and  sharpness  with  which  Paul  attacks  his 
readers  after  the  conciliatory  explanations  of  i.-vii.  and  the 
friendly  requests  of  viii.  and  ix.  are  certainly  startling.  Nor 
does  he  confine  himself  by  any  means  to  dealing  with  the 
agitators,  the  '  Christ '  party ;  he  appears  indignant  with  the 
disobedience  of  the  community,  which  he  distinguishes 
clearly  from  the  'few'  against  whom  a  life  and  death 
struggle  must  be  waged l ;  he  fears  that  it  will  let  it- 
self be  perverted 2 ;  he  takes  note  of  its  want  of  firmness 
towards  the  calumniators 3 ;  he  is  even  prepared  for  an 
unsatisfactory  reception  of  his  apologia.4  Nor  does  he 
expect  to  find  the  community  in  anything  but  an  unsatis- 
factory state,"1  and  this  corresponds  ill  with  the  self-con- 
gratulatory tone  of  chaps,  i.  and  vii.  The  Corinthians 
seem  to  have  demanded  a  proof  that  Christ  was  speaking  by 
him,6  and  to  have  formally  assumed  towards  him  the  position 
of  Judge.7  Such  a  letter  might  well  be  said  to  have  been 

1  x.  2,  6,  7,  12,  etc.  *  xi.  3.  a  xi.  20. 

4  xii.  19.  *  xii.  20.  6  xiii.  3. 

7  xiii.  5. 


98  AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP,  i 

written '  with  many  tears,' l  and  to  be  calculated  to  test  th 
obedience  2 ;  and  that  an  epistle  containing  threats  like  thos 
of  xii.  20  fol.  and  xiii.  2  (vv.  i.  23  and  ii.  1  would  in  this 
case  sound  like  a  reference  to  xiii.   10)  should  have  call 
forth  '  sorrow  ' 3  from  its  readers,  may  be  easily  understo 
The   '  wrong-doer '  who   must  have    been   spoken  of  in   t 
intermediate  letter  4  seemed  also  to  be  present  in  the  '  Four 
Chapter  Epistle '  ;    he  was  the  '  such  a  one '  of  x.  7-11,  and 
he  was  referred  to  in  xi.  13  and  x.  11  by  the  same  indefmi 
word  (6  TOLOVTOS)  as  was  used  for  the  '  wrong-doer '  of  ii. 
And  no  doubt  remained  as  to  the  nature  of  the  wrong  af 
the  words  of  x.  10. 

Yes,  only  it  is  a  pity  that  the  similar  '  6  rotoOros- '  of  xii. 
2,  5  refers  to  Paul ;    that  worse  calumnies  than  those  pro- 
ceeding from  the  anonymous  person  of  x.  10  were  according 
to  x.    2   hurled   against   him   by   many   persons  ;    that   the 
constant   alternation    between    singular   and   plural    in   his 
attack  on  the  '  outside  '  apostles  5  excludes  the  idea  that  th 
Apostle's  wrath  was  here  chiefly  directed  against  a  defini 
person  for  a  piece  of  particular  insolence ;  and  that  the  m 
who  '  trusteth   in   himself  that  he  is   Christ's ' 6  (and  wl 
moreover,  cannot  be  identified  with  the  '  he  that  cometh  ' 
verse  xi.  4),  had  evidently  forced  himself  in  from  outside  ;m<l 
was  not  a  member  of  the  community,  so  that  he  could  hardly 
be  treated  as,  according  to  ii.  6,  the  '  wrong-doer  '  had  been. 
The  forgiveness  which  Paul  had  desired  for  this  man,  a: 
of  which  he  had  assured   him  on  his  own   part,  he  cou 
not  have  granted  to  an  enemy  of  the  Cross  of  Christ,  a 
still  less  could  he  have  made  use  of  the  reason  furnish 
by  verse  ii.  10  in  such  a  case ;  and  if  the  wrong-doer  belong 
to  the  category  of  agitators  described  in  chaps,  x.  fol. 
statement  of  the  object  of  the  Epistle  as  given  in  vii. 
would    be    flagrantly   untrue.      Nor   does    Paul    make   an 
demands  concerning  an  offender  in  these  chapters,  as  accord 
ing  to  ii.  5  fol.  and  vii.  12  he  must  have  done  in  the  inter- 
mediate letter.     Another  forcible  argument  is  that  any  hostile 

1  ii.  4.  2  ii.  9.  •  vii.  8-11.  4  vii.  12,  ii.  5  fol. 

•  xi.  5-xii.  11 ;  cf.  Gal.  v.  10  beside  v.  12  and  iv.  17. 


§  7.]  THE    TWO    EPISTLES    TO    TIIK    CORINTHIANS  99 

expressions  as  to  the  harshness  of  his  epistles  '  in  contradis- 
tinction to  the  weakness  of  his  bodily  presence  would  certainly 
have  been  explicable  after  the  arrival  of  such  a  letter  of  punish- 
ment (chaps,  x.-xiii.) — of  which  he  wrote  several  in  the 
course  of  his  life — but  not  before  :  not,  that  is  to  say,  simply 
on  the  ground  of  1.  Corinthians  and  the  pre-canonical  epistle, 
which  certainly  cannot  have  bristled  with  threats.  Finally, 
verse  xii.  18  is  decisive.  Here  we  are  told  that  Paul  had 
sent  Titus  and  '  a  brother  '  to  Corinth,  and  these  words,  were  it 
only  for  the  verbs  used,  viz.  TrapsKaKscra,  which  corresponds 
to  viii.  6  and  17,  crvva7reo-Tsi\a,  with  which  compare  viii.  18 
and  22,  and  o-w^irs^a^v — can  only  refer  to  the  second  depu- 
tation mentioned  in  chapter  viii.  as  having  already  started.2 
Even  if  they  referred,  however,  to  the  mission  of  Titus, 
which  had  just  reached  a  happy  termination  in  Macedonia, 
an  epistle  which  treated  that  event  as  past  cannot  have  been 
the  intermediate  letter  of  which  Titus  was  himself  the 
bearer,  or  which  rendered  the  intervention  of  Titus  necessary. 
Hence  it  would  be  more  reasonable  to  employ  the 
hypothesis  of  the  Four  Chapter  Epistle  in  such  a  way  as  to 
assume  yet  a  fifth  epistle  to  the  Corinthians,  one  written  after 
chaps.  2.  i.-ix.  and  when  the  deputation  for  the  Collection 
had  already  arrived  at  Corinth 3 ;  in  that  case  we  should 
be  free  to  place  Paul's  second  visit  between  the  two  divisions 
of  the  epistle,  and  should  understand  why  this  visit  had  been 
made  so  prominent  in  the  last  four  chapters  only,  while  it 
would  not  be  absolutely  necessary  for  the  comprehension 
of  i.-ix.  But  such  a  visit  could  only  have  occurred  as  a 
useless  detour  from  Macedonia,  for  Paul  could  not  while  at 
Ephesus  have  asked  so  confidently :  '  Did  Titus  take  any 
advantage  of  you  ?  ' 4  and  we  may  not  place  it  too  close  to  the 
third  and  last,  because  of  vv.  xii.  20  fol.  Moreover,  the 

1  x.  1,  9,  10  and  11. 

2  That  here  only  one  brother  is  spoken  of,  while  in  chapter  viii.  it  seems 
that  two  were  accompanying  Titus,  is  no  argument  for  a  different  situation, 
since  Paul  may  well  have  felt  himself  responsible  only  for  that  one  whom  he 
had  himself  tested  (viii.  22)  and  had  himself  despatched  to  Corinth,  while  the 
other  appears  rather  as  joining  the  party  on  his  own  initiative,  as  representative 
of  the  Churches. 

3  xii.  17  fol.  4  xii.  18. 

H  2 


• 


: 


100         AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE   NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP. 

relations  between  Paul  and  the  Corinthian  Church  become 
psychologically  insoluble  riddle,  if  Paul  had  not  only  abandoned 
the  plans  of  chaps,  viii.  and  ix.  yet  again,  but  had  also 
paid  a  visit  to  Corinth  after  the  reconciliation  effected  by 
Titus,  solely  in  order  to  leave  an  impression  of  weakness 
behind  him,  to  threaten  measures  of  punishment  at  his  next 
coming,  and  to  have  insults  flung  in  his  face.  Thus  by  his 
ill-judged  appearance  he  would  have  completely  ruined  a 
delicate  matter  which  had  been  running  quite  smoothly  ;  and 
this  again  would  be  hardly  consistent  with  the  note  of  confi- 
dence struck  in  various  places  1  throughout  these  chapters. 

We  should  do  well,  then,  to  accept  these  four  chapters,  on 
the  evidence  of  tradition,  as  written  contemporaneously  with 
2.  Cor.  i.-ix.,  for  they  can  neither  be  of  earlier  nor  of  latei 
date,  nor  could  anyone  but  Paul  have  written  them.     To 
indeed,  some  things  in  them  seem  strange ;  the  rapid  chanj 
in  tone  and  attitude  strikes  us  as  astonishing :    but  then  w< 
have  a  far  more  imperfect  knowledge  of  the  situation  of  th< 
writer  than  the  earliest  readers  of  the  Epistle,  by  whom  alon< 
Paul  desired  to  be  understood. 

In  any  case,  Paul  would  certainly  not  have  dictated 
long  a  letter  all  at  once  ;   and  often  a  change  of  tone  or 
imperfect  connection  may  be  explained  by  that  alone.     It 
possible,  even,  that  there  may  have  been  an  interval  of  som< 
length   between   the  beginning   and   the   completion  of   th( 
letter,  that  it  was  interrupted  by  the  hasty  despatch  of  Til 
and  that  after  the  departure  of  this  gentle  mediator  resent- 
ment obtained  the  ascendency  in  Paul's  mind.     Nor,  perhaps, 
had  even  Titus  had  nothing  but  good  news  to  report,  and  it  if 
possible  that  Paul  had  but  just  received  tidings  from  anothei 
source  of  new  and  base  attacks  upon  him  by  the  '  men 
Christ.'     But  indeed  we  have  no  need  for  such  explanatoi 
hypotheses.     Paul  had  probably  intended  from  the  outset 
deal  in  succession  with  the  three  subjects  which  now  filled  hi* 
mind  whenever  he  thought  of  Corinth — first  with  the  positive 
and   then    with  the  negative.      In   the  first   place  it  would 
certainly   be   expedient   to   give   a   gracious   answer   to   the 
repentant  advances  of  the  community — wisdom  and  love  both 

1  x.  2,  5,  6,  xi.  1  fol.,  xii.  20  fol.,  xiii.  10-12. 


§  7.]  THE   TWO   EPISTLES   TO   THE   CORINTHIANS  101 

pointed  to  such  a  course.  But  not  only  do  the  digressions  of 
chaps,  ii.-vi.  prove  how  much  Paul  thought  his  readers  still 
in  need  of  deeper  instruction  and  more  careful  guidance ;  it  is 
distinctly  stated  here,  and  not  only  in  chaps,  x.-xiii.,  that  but 
a  partial  result  had  as  yet  been  attained,  and  that  the  com- 
munity was  far  from  having  purged  itself  of  all  distrust  of  its 
Apostle.  There  are  a  large  number  of  passages  }  which 
reveal  definite  grievances  and  anxieties  on  Paul's  part 
with  regard  to  the  Corinthians  ;  and  even  in  the  matter  of 
the  Collection  he  is  obliged  to  approach  them  with  great 
caution  and  formality,  whereas  with  the  Macedonians  re- 
straint rather  than  encouragement  had  been  needed.  And 
since  he  was  writing  to  the  whole  community  and  not  to  the 
submissive  majority  only,-  since  he  desired  to  find  all  clear 
on  his  arrival,  and  not  to  be  hindered  in  his  pastoral  labours 
by  disputes  with  the  lying  apostles,  at  whose  door  lay  all  the 
strife,  or  with  their  thoughtless  followers,  he  must  and  would 
express  his  attitude  towards  these  rebellious  persons  and 
their  doctrines  finally  and  in  writing.  And  who  will  wonder 
that  a  man  of  Paul's  stamp  should  again  have  struck  a 
harsher  note  than  before  towards  the  whole  community,  as 
he  recalled  how  easily  the  Corinthians  had  suffered  them- 
selves to  be  imposed  upon  concerning  him — with  what  in- 
constancy, shallowness  and  at  the  same  time  arrogance  they 
had  behaved  ? 

But,  however  bitterly  he  writes  in  these  passages,  it  had 
not  been  his  intention  to  do  so  ;  his  admonition  was  to  have 
been  given  in  '  meekness  and  gentleness,' 3  since  he  was 
already  certain  of  the  complete  rout  of  his  antagonists.4  It 
is,  however,  only  at  the  end  5  that  he  recovers  once  more  the 
tranquillity  which  he  had  not  always  been  able  to  maintain 
in  his  argument  with  such  adversaries.  For  our  part,  we 
may  perhaps  think  that  he  would  have  done  better  to  place 
the  controversial  part  at  the  beginning  of  his  letter,  and  to 
have  left  his  readers  with  the  final  impression  that  wherever 
there  was  any  desire  to  make  peace  with  him,  he  on  his  side 

1  E.g.,  i.  12  fol.  (ver.  14,  a*k  /*e>ous),  i.  23  fol.,  ii.  5,  9,  17,  iii.  1,  5,  iv.  2,  5,  7 
fol.,  v.  11  fol.  20,  vi.  1,  3,  4-13,  vii.  2  fol.,  viii.  22,  ix.  3. 

2  ii.  6.  s  x.  1.  *  x.  2-6.  *  xiii.  6-13. 


102          AX    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  I. 

was  ready  to  give  any  proof  of  his  hearty  willingness  to  forgive 
and  to  trust  again.  But  he  had  good  reason  for  his  pro- 
cedure. Chaps,  i.-ix.  seem  to  have  been  written  in  Timothy's 
name  as  well  as  his  own,  while  chaps,  x.-xiii.  were  meant 
to  be  understood  as  spoken  by  himself  alone.  The  avros  &s 
eya)  HavXos  of  x.  1,  does  not  stand  in  contradistinction  to  the 
long-forgotten  '  brethren  '  of  ix.  3  and  5,  but  introduces  a 
personal  explanation  on  Paul's  part — probably  written,  like 
Galatians,  with  his  own  hand — in  which,  as  though  between 
man  and  man,  he  lays  the  bare  truth  before  the  faithful 
portion  of  the  Corinthian  community,  demonstrating  both  to 
them  and  to  us  what  was  and  had  been  the  question  at  issue 
between  himself  and  them.  They  were  to  feel  that  the  only 
course  which  remained  to  them  was,  either  to  lose  their 
Apostolic  father  or  else  to  come  to  a  definite  breach  with  these 
Judaistic  disturbers  of  the  peace.  Chaps,  i.-ix.  proclaim 
the  conclusion  of  a  truce  in  the  matter  of  the  offender, 
and  chaps,  x.-xiii.  lay  down  the  conditions  of  a  lasting 
peace.  The  situation  that  confronts  us  in  x.-xiii.  is  none 
other  than  that  of  i.-ix.,  but  in  the  two  divisions  the  same 
circumstances  are  regarded  from  entirely  different  points  of 
view.  And  that  they  did  require  such  two-sided  illumination 
is  just  what  we  should  expect  from  the  nature  of  such  a  situa- 
tion. Paul  seems  to  have  judged  it  aright,  for  soon  after  the 
completion  of  this  Epistle  he  stayed  at  Corinth  for  three 
months,  and — to  judge  from  a  work  most  probably  composed 
during  his  stay  there,  the  Epistle  to  the  Komans  —not  by  any 
means  in  a  disturbed  or  gloomy  state  of  mind. 


§  8.  The  Epistle  to  the  Eomans 

[Cf.  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  vol.  iv.,  by  B.  Weiss,  1899 ;  Hand-Corn 
tar  ii.  2  (Gal.  Eom.  Phil,  by  E.  A.  Lipsius,  1892) ;  'Internat.  Critical 
Commentary,'  by  W.  Sanday  and  A.  Headlam.  1900 ;  the  special 
commentaries  of  E.  Bohmer  (1886)  and  of  G.  Volkmar  (1875),  both 
differing  widely  from  the  traditional  form  of  exegesis  ;  of  F.  Godet, 
translated  into  German  by  Wunderlich  (1890,  see  p.  78)  and  of 
A.  Schlatter  (1894,  see  p.  68).  Also  E.  Grafe's  '  Uber  Veranlas- 
sung  und  Zweck  des  Eomerbriefes  '  (1881),  a  lucid  investigation 
of  the  introductory  questions  and  review  of  the  criticism  hitherto 


llltJItU 


- 


THK    EPISTLE    TO    THE    ROMANS  103 


devoted  to  it,  and  W.  Mangold's  '  Der  Romerbrief  und  seine 
geschichtlichen  Voraussetzungen,'  a  vigorous  defence  of  Baur's 
theory  of  the  Jewish-Christian  character  of  the  Roman  community  ; 
H.  Lucht  :  '  Uber  die  beiden  letzten  Capitel  d.  Romerbriefs,'  1871 
(an  acute  defence  of  Baur's  theses  touching  chs.  xv.  and  xvi.  25-27, 
and  of  the  relative  authenticity  of  xvi.  1-23).  E.  Riggenbach,  '  Die 
Adresse  des  XVI  Cap.  des  Romerbriefs  '  and  '  Die  Textgesch.  der 
Doxologie  Rm.  xvi.  25-27  '  in  '  Neues  Jahrbuch  fiirdeutsche  Theo- 
logie,'  1892,  498-605,  and  cf.  ibid.  1894,  350  ff.  (a  learned  defence 
of  its  authenticity  and  integral  connection  with  Romans).] 

1.  Apart  from  the  introduction  and  conclusion,  our  Epistle 
falls  clearly  into  two  divisions  —  chaps,  i.-xi.  being  argu- 
mentative, and  chaps,  xii.-xv.  hortative.  The  first  part  — 
which  might  be  termed  an  exposition  of  Paul's  Gospel—  is 
again  divided  between  chaps,  viii.  and  ix.  ;  in  the  first  half 
Paul  defends  his  faith  against  the  religious  errors  of  Ju- 
daism, and  in  the  second  (ix.-xi.),  against  nationalist  objec- 
tions of  the  Jews.  A  lengthy  composition,  it  is  free  from  all 
signs  of  excitement,  and  is  written  with  much  care  ;  and 
though,  nevertheless,  the  writer's  warmth  of  feeling  again  and 
again  finds  striking  expression,  the  chain  of  thought  is  not 
thereby  interrupted  —  and  in  any  case  Paul  could  not  have 
described  the  way  to  righteousness  and  life  in  the  style  of  a 
catechism.  It  is  well  known  how  highly  Luther  valued  this 
Epistle,  and  indeed  it  is  the  most  important  foundation  for  the 
study  of  Paul's  Christianity,  although  for  the  history  of  his 
times  it  is  not  quite  so  valuable. 

The  address,1  with  its  unusually  full  description  of  the 
writer's  qualifications,  is  followed  by  a  thanksgiving,  combined 
with  an  explanation  of  the  motives  which  led  Paul  to  open 
direct  communication  with  his  readers.  He  hopes  before  long 
to  preach  the  Gospel  to  them  also,  and  in  i.  16  fol.  lays 
down  the  principle  that  the  Gospel  is  the  revelation  of  the 
righteousness  of  God,  and  that  for  such  revelation  Faith 
is  the  Alpha  and  Omega.  He  then  illustrates  this  thesis 
first  negatively  2  and  then  positively.3  (a)  Negatively  :  before 
faith  existed,  and  without  faith  now,  there  neither  was  nor  IB 

1  i.  1-7.  -  i.  18-iii.  20.  s  iii.  21-viii.  39. 


104         AN   INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  i. 

true  righteousness — neither  in  the  Pagan  l  nor  the  Jewish  '2 
world,  which,  certain  though  it  was  that  God  in  his  unalter- 
able fidelity  would  some  day  fulfil  the  promises  vouchsafed  to 
Israel,  could  never  attain  to  freedom  from  sin  and  punish- 
ment through  the  Law,  but  only  to  a  knowledge  of  sin. 
(6)  Positively :  through  the  expiatory  death  of  Jesus  Christ, 
God,  without  relaxing  aught  of  his  justice,  had  established  re- 
mission of  sins  and  bestowed  the  gift  of  perfect  righteousness 
on  Gentiles  as  well  as  Jews,  on  the  sole  condition  of  faith.* 
But  this  assertion  was  no  contradiction  of  the  Law.  On 
the  contrary,  it  was  confirmed  by  the  Law  4  in  the  story  of 
Abraham.5  Neither  was  it  contradicted  by  our  own  experience, 
for  no  afflictions  could  rob  us  of  the  feeling  of  reconciliation, 
of  peace  with  God  and  of  hope  in  his  glory.6  This  alone 
made  it  possible  to  understand  the  ways  of  God  in  history  ; 
as  sin  and  death  had  extended  to  all  mankind  from  the  one 
Adam,  and  were  not  conquered,  but  only  accentuated,  by  the 
Law,  so  by  the  one  Jesus  Christ  righteousness  and  life  were 
now  conveyed  to  all.  A  new  epoch  in  the  world's  history  had 
opened,  an  epoch  directly  opposed  to  the  last,  and  consequently 
having  nothing,  not  even  the  Law,  in  common  with  it.7  Faith 
did  not  even  require  the  Law  as  a  supplement,  for  men 
were  no  longer  to  be  in  bondage  to  sin  ;  the  believer  had 
died  to  sin  by  the  act  of  baptism  8 ;  sanctification  was  the 
fundamental  condition  of  eternal  life.9  The  Law  had  now  no 
further  claim  upon  us,  since  Christ's  death  had  released  us 
from  it.10 

That  the  Law  was  good  and  divine,  however,  was  not  in  any 
way  to  be  denied  ;  only,  sold  unto  sin  as  we  were  by  the  flesh,  in 
spite  of  the  joy  of  the  inward  man  in  the  Law  of  God,  as  in  all 
else  that  was  good,  the  Law  had  no  power  beyond  that  of  show- 
ing us  the  full  extent  of  our  impotence  and  need.11  But  now  a 
new  day  had  dawned  ;  whoever  was  in  Christ  had  passed  the 
period  of  the  flesh  and  the  Law  ;  he  walked  in  the  Spirit  as  a 
child  of  God,  released  from  all  bondage  and  fear  and  in  the 

1  i.  18-32.  2  ii.  1-iii.  20.  »  iii.  21-30. 

4  iii.  31-iv.  25.  5  Gen.  xv.  6.  6  v.  1-11. 

7  v.  12-21.  »  vi.  1-14.  a  vi.  15-23. 

10  vii.  1-6.  "  vii.  7-25. 


§  8.]  THE   EPISTLE   TO   THE    ROMANS  105 

presence  of  an  infinite  felicity,  in  which  the  rest  of  creation 
should  come  to  share.1 

Paul  then  introduces  his  discussion  of  the  nationalist  ob- 
jections of  the  Jews  by  admitting  the  fact  that  Israel,  the 
chosen  people,  had  held  aloof  from  Christ.2  But  the  promise 
of  God  had  only  been  given  to  the  spiritual  Israel, :;  and  God's 
mercy  might  choose  out  the  true  children  of  Abraham  freely 
wherever  it  would.4  Every  potter  has  a  right  over  his  clay, 
to  make  out  of  it  vessels  unto  honour  or  unto  dishonour,  as  he 
wills.  Nor  ought  the  carnal  Israel  to  complain  that  it  did  not 
form  part  of  this  chosen  body,  for  in  spite  of  all  its  zeal  for  the 
Law  it  had  obstinately  pursued  the  phantom  of  self-righteous- 
ness, and  refused  to  listen  to  the  clearest  exhortations 
of  the  Scriptures  to  faith  in  Jesus  Christ.5  To  want  of 
understanding  was  added  active  disobedience.  But,  thank 
God,  not  all  the  Israelites  were  hardened :  a  remnant  there 
was  which  had  been  chosen  out.6  And  even  the  temporary 
casting  out  of  the  great  majority  of  them  had  an  educational 
purpose :  Israel,  or  all  that  was  left  of  it,  would  be  saved  at 
last,  after  all  the  Gentiles,  and  the  broken  branches  of  the 
olive-tree  would  be  grafted  in  again.7 

Then,  with  a  skilful  change  of  argument,  the  Apostle  in- 
troduces his  exhortation  with  the  wish  that  his  readers,  hav- 
ing freed  themselves  from  the  old  delusions,  should  render 
reasonable  service  to  God — the  service  of  the  'good,  the 
acceptable,  and  the  perfect.' 8  This  idea  is  then  illustrated 
by  a  number  of  short  general  precepts  concerning  true  Chris- 
tian behaviour  both  within  the  community  and  towards  the 
world  at  large.9  Special  stress  is  laid  on  the  duty  of  subjec- 
tion to  '  the  higher  powers,' 10  after  which  everything  is 
summed  up  in  the  commandment  '  Love  thy  neighbour  as 
thyself,'  n  and  the  imminence  of  the  Last  Day  dwelt  upon 
as  a  motive  for  'walking  honestly.'12  Then  from  xiv.  1 
to  xv.  13,  he  gives  his  advice  upon  a  difficulty  peculiar  to 
the  Eoman  community,  showing  that  brotherly  love  would 

1  viii.  1-39.  2  ix.  1-5.  3  ix.  6-13. 

4  ix.  14-29.  *  ix.  30 -x.  21.  °  xi.  1-10. 

7  xi.  11-36.  8  xii.  1  and  2.  9  xii.  3-21. 

10  xiii.  1-7.  "  xiii.  8-10.  12  11-14. 


106         AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE   NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  I. 

avoid  the  faults  committed  on  both  sides  in  the  disputes 
between  the  '  strong  '  and  the  '  weak ' — eaters  of  meat  and 
vegetarians.  Then  follow  1  explanations  of  a  personal  kind  on 
the  subject  of  his  plans  of  travel  and  of  the  part  which  Rome 
was  to  play  in  them.  In  vv.  xvi.  1  and  2  he  desires  his  readers 
to  extend  a  warm  welcome  to  a  certain  Phoebe,  a  Christian 
of  Cenchreae ;  the  salutations  that  follow 2  are  interrupted 
between  vv.  17  and  21  by  a  sharp  warning  against  sowers 
of  strife  and  false  apostles,  and  with  a  solemn  doxology  the 
Epistle  ends. 

2.  Verse  i.  13  alone  :i  would  be  sufficient  to  induce  us  to 
assign  the  Epistle  to  the  Eomans  to  a  late  period  of  Paul's 
life.     But  in  chap,  xv.4  he  says  still  more  plainly  that  he  had 
finished  his   work   in   the   East  from   Jerusalem   as  far  as 
Illyricum,  and  was  now  intending  to  set  out  via  Rome  for  the 
conquest  of  Spain."    He  was  at  present  on  his  way  to  Jerusalem 
in  order  to  hand  over  there  the  results  of  the  Collection  made 
in  Macedonia  and  Achaia.6     And  since  he  could  not  very  well 
have  written  an  Epistle  of  this  sort  on  board  ship  or  at  one 
of  the  stations  on  the  journey,  our  thoughts  naturally  turn 
to  Corinth  as  the  place  of  composition,  for  it  was  there  that 
Paul  spent    the  last    three  months  uninterruptedly   before 
his  journey.7     Besides,  the  recommendation  of  a  woman  of 
Cenchreae,  the  port  of  Corinth,8  would  most  naturally  have 
proceeded  from  Corinth,  while  Gaius,  the  man  who  is  men- 
tioned in  xvi.  23  as  Paul's  host,  may  be  identical  with  his 
namesake  of  1.  Cor.  i.  14.     It  was  in  the  early  part  of  58 — 
that  is  to  say,  about  six  months  after  the  production  of  2.  Cor. 
— that  Paul  introduced  himself  by  letter  to  the  Romans. 

3.  This  date,  however,  is  principally  based  upon  verses 
whose  authenticity  is  by  no  means  undisputed.     As  early  as 
the  year  140,  approximately,  Marcion  imagined  himself  to  have 
discovered,  on  dogmatic  grounds,  numerous  interpolations  in 
the   canonical   text  of  Romans.     Similar  assertions   on   the 
part  of  modern  critics  possess  in  general  no  higher  scientific 

1  xv.  14-33.  •<  xvi.  3-23. 

3  'And  I  would  not  have  you  ignorant,  brethren,  that  oftentimes  I  pur- 
posed to  come  unto  you,  and  was  hindered  hitherto '  ;  cf.  Acts  xix.  21. 

4  Vv.  18-23.  s  xv.  24  and  28.  s  xv.  25  fol. 

xx.  3.  8  xvi.  1. 


$  8.]  THi:    Kl'ISTLK    TO    THK    ROMANS  107 

value  -though  it  is  true  that  in  vii.  25-viii.  1,  for  instance, 
the  traditional  text  is  really  not  tenable  ;  but  to  prove  this  in 
detail  belongs  to  the  province  of  exegesis.  But  Baur  and  his 
school  have  rejected  chaps,  xv.  and  xvi.  as  an  appendix  added 
in  the  second  century  in  the  interests  of  reconciling  the 
anti-Pauline  party,  and  have  at  most  recognised  a  few  frag- 
ments of  a  genuine  Pauline  Epistle  wrought  into  them.1  This 
theory,  indeed,  seems  not  to  be  without  external  evidence  too, 
for  Marcion's  version  of  Romans  broke  off  at  xiv.  23,  and  in 
the  West  the  Church  itself  seems  to  have  possessed  copies 
in  which  verse  xiv.  23  was  followed  by  the  doxology 2  alone. 
And  if  in  the  Greek  manuscripts  this  last  is  sometimes  placed 
after  both  chaps,  xiv.  and  xvi.,  sometimes  only  after  xiv.  23— 
but  in  such  a  way  that  chaps,  xv.  and  xvi.  would  then  follow  on 
sometimes  only  after  xvi.  3,  and  in  some  copies  was  entirely 
wanting,  this  variation  would  also  bear  witness  to  some  uncer- 
tainty in  the  tradition  from  verse  xiv.  23  onwards.  These 
points  of  textual  history  would  be  best  explained  by  sup- 
posing that  the  Epistle  was  circulated  in  two  versions,  the 
one  reaching  as  far  as  xiv.  23,  the  other  as  far  as  xvi.  23 
(or  24),  and  that  the  doxology  was  appended  first  to  the 
shorter,  where  the  want  of  a  fitting  ending  would  have  been 
felt  particularly  keenly  after  xi.  36,  and  afterwards  to  the 
longer  version  as  well.  In  my  opinion,  it  is  impossible  to 
admit  that  it  fits  better  between  xiv.  23  and  xv.  1  than  after 
xvi.  23,  though  undoubtedly  its  transference  thence  to  the 
end  of  the  Epistle  is  easier  to  imagine  than  the  converse. 
The  discovery  of  a  delicate  inner  connection  between  the 
doxology  and  the  contents  especially  of  xiv.  1-xv.  13  is 
probably  a  case  of  '  the  wish  is  father  to  the  thought.'  It  is 
true  that,  in  spite  of  its  numerous  points  of  contact  with 
Pauline  phraseology  (Kara  TO  suayysXiov  pov  is  specifically 
Pauline),  the  doxology  does  almost  sound  as  though  it 
were  the  product  of  a  later  time — a  time  that  loved  a  pleni- 
tude of  liturgic  formulae ;  its  reference  to  the  Father  as  the 
'  eternal '  and  *  only  wise  '  God  is  without  analogy  in  Paul's 
writings.  Still,  I  should  not  definitely  venture  to  assert  its 

1  E.g.,  xv.  30-33  and  xvi.  1  and  2.  -  xvi.  25-27. 


108         AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  i. 

spuriousness  as  long  as  the  spuriousness  of  the  Epistle  to  the 
Ephesians  is  not  placed  beyond  question. 

Whoever  does  so  venture,  however,  is  by  no  means  obliged 
to  treat  the  remaining  part  of  the  two  chapters  in  the  same 
way.  Verse  xiv.  23  being  an  extremely  awkward  ending  for  a 
letter,  it  is  in  itself  more  likely  that  the  shorter  version  of  the 
Epistle,  if  it  ever  existed,  should  represent  a  mutilation — 
although  hardly  one  caused  by  design — than  that  the  longer 
should  have  arisen  through  the  additions  of  a  later  hand. 
The  salutations  of  xvi.  3-16  and  21-23  contain  nothing  that 
savours  of  fabrication  ;  it  is  impossible  to  believe  seriously 
that  an  Andronicus  and  a  Junias  should  still  in  the  second 
century  have  been  reckoned  among  the  Apostles,1  whereas 
this  would  have  been  quite  in  keeping  with  Pauline  usage. 
The  fact  that  they  were  Christians  before  him  is  accentuated 
by  Paul  as  an  additional  motive  for  respecting  them.  But 
how  improbable  this  from  the  pen  of  a  later  writer  !  Nor, 
above  all,  can  anyone  have  had  the  smallest  object  in  ascribing 
the  recommendation  of  Phoebe  to  Paul.  Vv.  xvi.  17-20  are 
certainly  very  surprising  in  their  present  place,  but  otherwise 
they  bear  the  Pauline  stamp  both  in  form  and  matter.  The 
best  analogies  for  the  abruptness  of  the  condemnation  are 
to  be  found  in  2.  Cor.  x.  fol.  and  in  Philippians  iii.,  while 
Romans  vi.  17  affords  a  parallel  for  the  application  of  the  word 
1  doctrine '  to  the  Gospel.  In  ver.  20  the  end  of  the  world  is 
evidently  expected  in  the  immediate  future.-  As  to  chap,  xv., 
in  the  first  place  it  follows  admirably  upon  xiv.  as  far  as 
verse  13  ;  *  the  strong '  and  *  the  weak '  of  xv.  refer  to  precisely 
the  same  persons  as  before,  and  the  '  circumcision  '  and  the 
'  Gentiles '  '  are  only  brought  in  to  illustrate  the  principle  that 
in  *  receiving  '  each  other,  they,  both  the  strong  and  the  weak, 
were  only  following  the  example  set  them  by  Christ.  And 
that  Christ  should  in  ver.  8  be  called  the  *  minister  of  the 
circumcision  '  is  not  contrary  to  Paul's  usage,  but  merely  the 
recognition  of  an  historical  fact.  Nor,  in  the  second  place, 
do  vv.  14-38  show  us  a  fictitious  Paul,  half  submitting  to 
the  Jewish  Christians ;  he  surrenders  none  of  his  rights,4  but 

1  xvi.  7.  =  Cf.  Lk.  xviii.  8.  3  Ver.  7  fol. 

4  Vv.  16-20. 


§  8.]  THE    EPISTLE   TO   THE   ROMANS  109 

on  the  contrary  refers  to  certain  odious  principles  of  his 
Judaistic  adversaries,1  and  the  modesty  of  his  tone  towards  the 
Romans 2  arises  from  the  fact  that  he  could  not  there  come 
forward,  as  in  Corinth,  as  their  '  father  '  and  *  founder.'  In  ver. 
16  he  makes  use  of  a  metaphor  from  sacrificial  worship,  but  to 
discover  in  the  expressions  necessary  to  it  anything  pointing 
to  clericalism,  to  a  heightened  idea  of  the  priestly  character 
of  the  Church  official,  would  mean  a  very  perverted  interpre- 
tation. The  personal  messages  are  all  of  them  best  suited 
to  the  situation  in  which  Paul  then  was  ;  how  could  a  later 
writer  have  thought  of  making  him  plan  a  journey  to  Spain, 
and  even  ask  something  of  God  which  was  not  granted  him,3 
or  of  putting  a  doubt  into  his  mouth  as  to  the  reception  of 
his  collection-money  at  Jerusalem?  Not  a  sentence  of 
chap.  xv.  can  be  attributed  to  a  forger,  and  the  language  is  as 
characteristically  Pauline  as  that  of  xvi.  or  vii. 

4.  But  even  if  everything  in  the  Epistle  down  to  xvi.  27 
can  be  referred  to  Paul,  it  may  yet  not  have  formed  part  of 
the  original  Epistle  to  the  Romans.  Since  1829  the  theory 
brought  forward  by  David  Schulz  (in  Breslau)  that  Rom.  xvi. 
belonged  to  an  epistle  of  Paul  to  the  Ephesians  has 
gained  almost  universal  acceptance.  The  champions  of  this 
theory  are,  however,  disagreed  as  to  whether  chap.  xvi. 
represents  a  mere  fragment  of  an  epistle  to  the  Ephesians,  or 
one  that  is  practically  complete,  whether  it  should  begin  at 
ver.  1  or  only  at  ver.  3,  and  whether  vv.  17-20  and  21-23 
belong  to  it.  It  has  even  been  proposed  to  assign  chaps,  ix.-xi. 
or  xii.-xiv.  to  this  Ephesian  Epistle. 

It  is  in  any  case  improbable  that  Paul  should  have  had 
so  many  intimate  acquaintances  in  Rome  as  he  appears  from 
vv.  3-16  to  have  had  among  his  readers.  The  names 
themselves  tell  us  nothing — those  in  Latin  afford  no  proof  in 
favour  of  their  owners'  Western  extraction,  those  in  Greek 
none  against  it.  But  is  it  in  Rome  that  we  are  to  look  for 
Epaenetus, l '  the  first  fruits  of  Asia,'  and  for  Prisca  and  Aquila,5 
who  according  to  1.  Corinthians6  were  living  in  Ephesus  ? 
We  should  have  to  presuppose  a  sort  of  general  migration  of 

1  Ver.  -JO.  -  Ver.  15.  3  Ver.  31. 

1  Ver.  5.  3  Vv.  3  fol.  (i  xvi.  19 ;  and  cf.  2.  Tim.  iv.  19. 


110         AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  i. 

Paul's  Eastern  communities  to  Eome  in  order  to  render  con- 
ceivable the  presence  there  of  so  many  of  the  Apostle's  friends. 
And  Kufus  l  would  seem  to  have  taken  his  mother  with  him, 
and  Nereus  2  his  sister.  Then  are  we  to  suppose  that  Prisca 
and  Aquila  had  immediately  been  able  to  found  a  house- 
community  at  Eome 3  similar  to  that  which  they  had  collected 
at  Ephesus 4  ?  The  stress  laid  on  the  obligation  of  all  Gentile 
churches  to  them  in  xvi.  4  seems  indeed  to  fit  Eom.  xv.  16 
and  27  very  well,  but  the  expression,  which  occurs  nowhere 
else  in  Paul's  writings,  was  chosen  with  delicate  tact  in 
order  to  accentuate  their  merit  more  sharply,  since  they  were 
of  Jewish  extraction.  Everything  in  this  passage  points  to 
Ephesus,  none  of  it  to  Eome.  In  writing  to  the  strange 
Eoman  community  Paul  would  certainly  not  have  emphasised 
his  own  personal  connections  with  those  he  was  greeting  so 
often,5  and  on  the  same  grounds  I  should  also  be  inclined  to 
ascribe  vv.  1  and  2  to  the  Ephesian  letter.  Phoebe's  services 
to  Paul  personally  were  scarcely  adapted  to  impress  the 
Eomans  ;  but  the  question  as  to  whether  it  were  more  likely 
for  a  woman  of  Cenchreae  to  migrate  to  Ephesus  than  to 
Eome  does  not  seem  to  me  to  be  worth  much  argument. 
These  two  verses  furnish  us  with  a  motive  for  the  epistle — the 
address  has  of  course  disappeared,  but  probably  nothing  else  ; 
Paul  grants  Phoebe's  request  for  a  letter  of  recommendation 
to  a  place  where  his  recommendation  justly  carried  weight,  and 
makes  use  of  the  opportunity  to  greet  his  old  friends  and  to 
add  a  short  but  earnest  warning  to  his  readers fi  against  the 
disturbers  of  peace,  the  agitators  with  their  flattering  words. 
That  such  men  would  not  neglect  Ephesus  when  they  had 
worked  so  successfully  at  Corinth,  is  self-evident,  especially 
since  Paul  had  been  obliged  to  fly  from  that  city.  But  there 
was  no  need  for  a  systematic  attack,  since  Paul  was  still  sure 
of  his  community,  nor  would  there  have  been  room  for  one  in 
so  short  a  letter.  Even  its  tone  here  diverges  remarkably 
from  that  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Eomans — ver.  19,  for  instance, 
with  its  'your  obedience,'  'I  would  have  you,'  does  not  suit 
the  latter  at  all :  and  the  place  would  be  singularly  inappro- 

1  Ver.  13.  »  Ver.  15.  J  Ver.  5.  '  1.  Cor.  xvi.  10. 

1  Vv.  3,  4,  5.  7,  8,  <J.  11  an<l  13.  •  Vv.  17-20. 


§  8.]  TUK    EPISTLE    TO    THE    ROMANS  111 

priate  for  so  important  an  exhortation.  The  chief  objection, 
however,  lies  in  xvi.  17-20,  for  the  other  reasons  are  only  of 
the  *  more  or  less  probable  '  rank.  If  Paul  wrote  these  words 
to  the  Komans  it  would  be  necessary  to  construct  a  very 
different  view  of  the  community  from  that  which  is  based  on 
chapters  i.-xv.  Simply  for  prudential  reasons  Paul  would  never 
have  written  so  sharply  to  a  community  with  which  he  was 
unacquainted  ;  had  he,  then,  entirely  forgotten  the  intermediate 
rdX^ripoTSpov  sypa^jra  of  XV.  15  ? 

Vv.  xvi.  1-20  can  therefore  be  described  with  tolerable 
certainty  as  they  stand,  as  a  miniature  epistle  of  Paul  to  the 
Ephesians.  On  the  other  hand,  vv.  21-23  would  suit  an 
epistle  to  Eome  just  as  well  as  one  to  Ephesus.  The  Epistle 
to  the  Eomans  has  indeed  an  amply  sufficient  ending  in  verse 
xv.  33,  but  greetings  like  those  of  xvi.  21-23  may  yet  very 
well  have  followed  it,  and  it  even  sounds  as  though  Paul  were 
now  for  the  first  time  introducing  the  senders  of  these 
greetings  to  his  readers,  to  whom  they  were  personally 
unknown.  And  in  an  epistle  to  the  Ephesians  everyone  would 
expect  these  three  verses  to  come  before  ver.  16  rather  than 
after  ver.  20.  But  if  we  consider  vv.  21-23  as  the  origi- 
nal ending  of  Komans,  the  short  Ephesian  epistle  would 
then  have  been  inserted  into  it,  and  that  is  a  much  more 
doubtful  hypothesis  than  that  of  its  being  added  to  it.  That 
this  addition  took  place  very  early  is  easily  conceivable  if  both 
Epistles  were  written  at  the  same  time,  and  perhaps  by  the 
hand  of  the  same  scribe  (i.e.  the  Corinthian  Tertius1).  At 
any  rate,  we  should  definitely  place  the  letter  of  recommenda- 
tion during  Paul's  last  sojourn  at  Corinth  because  of  vv. 
xvi.  1,  and  ver.  7  is  no  objection,  for  Paul  had  had  'fellow- 
prisoners  '  not  only  at  Eome  and  Cassarea,  but  also  before,- 
and  the  two  here  named  had  probably  shared  his  imprison- 
ment on  the  same  occasion  as  that  on  which  Aquila  and  Prisca 
had  risked  their  necks  for  his  life.  Nor  need  it  surprise  us  that 
six  or  eight  months  after  the  event  Paul  still  had  it  vividly 
before  his  eyes.  Again,  there  is  no  necessity  to  suppose  that 
this  epistle  was  the  first  that  he  had  addressed  to  his  Ephesian 
community  since  that  sorrowful  departure,  so  that  we  need 

1  xvi.  22.  -  Cf.  2.  Cor.  xi.  23. 


112         AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE   NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  I. 

not  expect  a  passage  of  lamentation  over  those  experiences  or 
thanksgiving  for  his  deliverance.  These  expressions  had 
found  utterance  before,  since  Paul  had  some  feeling  for  his 
community — but  they  have  disappeared. 

5.  Having  now  determined  the  compass  of  the  Epistle  to 
the  Eomans,  we  may  hope  to  form  a  clearer  idea  as  to  its 
object.  In  spite  of  the  violent  opposition  of  modern  authori- 
ties, we  must  unhesitatingly  assert  that  this,  like  the  rest  of 
Paul's  Epistles,  was  written  to,  that  is  to  say  for,  a  single 
community — in  this  case  that  of  Eome — and  that  it  was  in- 
tended for  this  one  community  and  was  meant  to  produce  an 
effect  upon  it  alone ;  not  that  it  was  an  outline  of  Pauline 
faith  and  teaching  for  the  world  at  large,  accidentally  clothed 
in  the  epistolary  form  which  its  author  found  so  natural,  and 
dedicated  by  a  clever  act  of  courtesy  to  the  important  com- 
munity of  the  world's  capital.  What  Paul  expresses  in  i.  11 
as  his  long-cherished  wish  in  making  this  approaching  visit  to 
Kome — namely,  to  impart  some  spiritual  gift  to  the  Eoman 
Christians  '  to  the  end  they  might  be  established  ' — is  also  his 
object  in  the  Epistle.  It  is  thus  that  he  begins  to  carry  out 
a  duty  towards  them  that  he  had  often  keenly  felt.1  He  had 
acquainted  himself  with  the  internal  affairs  of  the  Eoman 
community,  and  knew  of  the  friction  between  the  '  strong ' 
and  the  '  weak,'  '2  and  in  spite  of  the  phrases  « let  us  not 
therefore  judge  one  another,'  '  let  us  follow  after  things 
which  make  for  peace,' :i  it  is  not  a  section  of  his  ethical 
system  that  he  is  here  treating  of,  but  a  defect  peculiar  to 
the  Eoman  community  that  he  is  striving  to  eliminate  by 
'some  spiritual  gift.'1  Nor  is  it  by  chance  that  in  an  epistle 
to  the  Eomans  the  exhortation  to  a  loyal  bearing  towards 
the  '  higher  powers  ' 5  should  have  been  so  earnest  and  so 
comprehensive,  and  even  though  we  may  not  be  able  to 
prove  in  the  rest  of  the  Epistle  that  Paul's  apologetic  and 
parsenetic  arguments  were  aimed  especially  at  the  Christians 
of  Eome,  yet  in  many  passages  of  other  Epistles  proof  of  this 
sort  is  equally  impossible.  But  the  animation  of  the  tone,  the 
passages  scattered  through  it  beginning  *  brethren,' '  beloved,' 

1  i.  14  fol.  -  xiv.  fol.  s  xiv.  13  and  19  :  cf.  xv.  1  and  2. 

1  xiv.  13,  Kpivart ;   10,  vpiav  rb  aya66v  fc.T.A.  ;   XV.  5,  6,  7.  *   xiii.  1-7. 


§  a]  TIN;  I;PISTLE  TO  THE  ROMANS  113 

show  that  Paul  had  definite  readers  in  his  mind,  and  that  he 
was  not  speaking  in  monologue.  Nevertheless  it  is  not  to  be 
understood  by  this  that  he  possessed  a  clear  and  complete 
idea  of  the  situation  of  the  Roman  Christians  ;  naturally  not 
more  than  occasional  items  of  news  would  have  reached  his 
ears.  Nor  is  it  worth  while  to  warn  my  readers  against  the 
childish  pedantry  of  assuming  that  every  word  in  such  a 
work  of  doctrine  as  this,  which  explains  many  of  the  funda- 
mental problems  of  religion  in  so  thorough  and  systematic 
a  way,  was  directed  to  the  needs  of  Roman  hearers  alone  ; 
on  the  contrary,  we  must  here  test  the  writer's  apparent 
allusions  to  the  position  and  opinions  of  his  readers  with 
even  greater  care  than  in  the  case  of  the  Epistles  addressed 
to  communities  with  which  Paul  was  familiar. 

In  any  case  Paul  cannot  have  been  ignorant  of  the  ele- 
ments of  which  the  Christian  community  of  Rome  was  com- 
posed, and  this,  then,  we  in  our  turn  shall  learn  from  the 
Epistle.  Since  its  first  effort  is  to  remove  the  objections 
against  Paul's  Law-freed  Gospel,  it  has  been  concluded  in 
the  face  of  the  manifest  proofs  to  the  contrary  that  the  com- 
munity addressed  was  entirely  or  mainly  Jewish-Christian,  and 
biassed  with  the  prejudices  of  Judaism.  Paul  speaks  of  his 
readers  in  i.  5  fol.  and  xi.  13  simply  as  Gentiles,  and  vv. 
i.  13-15  would  have  no  meaning  if  the  Christians  of  Rome 
consisted  of  Jews  by  birth,  neither  would  xv.  14-16.  The 
tone  of  feeling  in  which  he  announces  his  approaching  journey 
to  Jerusalem  with  the  proceeds  of  the  Collection  }  does  not 
sound  to  me  like  a  bid  for  the  sympathy  of  the  Romans, 
whose  attention  is  to  be  drawn  thereby  to  the  piety  of  Paul's 
attitude  towards  the  primitive  community  of  the  Holy  Land, 
but  rather  like  a  preparatory  announcement  of  similar  collec- 
tions to  be  made  in  Rome.  Otherwise  there  would  be  some- 
thing unfitting  in  the  twofold  emphasis  laid  in  xv.  27  upon  the 
debt  to  the  saints  in  Jerusalem  which  the  Gentile  Christians 
were  bound  to  discharge.  Again,  it  is  scarcely  possible  that 
Paul  would  have  written  vv.  vi.  16-21  to  circumcised  Chris- 
tians. The  Jew  is  only  addressed  in  passages  of  animated 
contention  against  Judaistic  doctrine,2  otherwise,  especially  in 

1  xv.  25-28.  a  ii.  17. 


114      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP    i. 

chaps,  ix.-xi.,  the  Israelites  are  spoken  of  in  the  third  person, 
while  phrases  such  as  '  Abraham,  our  forefather  according  to 
the  flesh ' l  and  various  others 2  may  be  explained  in  the  same 
way,  or,  like  1.  Cor.  x.  1,  by  the  fact  that  Paul  was  treating 
the  facts  and  ideas  of  his  own  inward  experience  as  common 
Christian  property. 

Naturally  it  is  not  to  be  supposed  that  any  of  the  larger 
communities  of  Paul's  time  were  without  some  Jewish  admix- 
ture, least  of  all  that  of  Rome,  which  had  arisen  without  any 
help  from  the  Apostle  of  the  Gentiles.  And  this  is  why  Paul 
felt  his  position  towards  it  so  uncertain.  It  was  an  unknown 
quantity  to  him — a  Gentile  community  indeed,  and  therefore 
belonging  to  his  sphere  of  work,  but  not  founded  either  by 
him  or  by  any  of  his  companions,  and  therefore 3  outside 
his  jurisdiction.  The  legend  of  its  foundation  by  Peter 
has  been  abandoned,  but  nevertheless  it  must  have  been 
from  Jerusalem  that  the  Gospel  was  brought  to  Rome, 
although  not  by  means  of  special  emissaries,  but  through  the 
silent  channels  of  trade  between  the  Holy  Land  and  the 
Jewish  community  of  the  world's  capital.  The  first  Christians 
of  Rome  are  therefore  sure  to  have  been  Jews,  and  in  the 
strife  between  those  who  rejected  Jesus  and  those  who  thought 
him  the  Messiah, — which  led  to  the  well-known  Edict  of  the 
Emperor  Claudius  '  Judaeos  impulsore  Chresto  assidue 
tumultuantes  Roma  expulit ' 4— it  was  probably  with  the  latter 
that  proselytes  sided  more  abundantly.  These  again  won 
further  converts  to  the  new  religion  among  Gentile  circles, 
and  it  was  precisely  this  Imperial  edict  expelling  the  Jews 
from  Rome,  which,  besides  bringing  about  a  strong  preponder- 
ance of  the  Gentile  Christian  element  in  the  Messianic  com- 
munity— for  solely  because  of  his  faith  in  the  Messiah  no 
Jew  could  escape  the  doom  of  banishment — probably  resulted 
also  in  the  final  separation  there  between  Jews  and  Christians, 
because  this  was  to  the  interest  of  both. 

Now,  it  would  have  been  quite  possible  for  Gentile  Chris- 
tians to  have  imposed  upon  themselves  the  observance  of  the 
entire  Mosaic  Law,  as  the  Galatians  had  been  prepared  to  do, 


1    iv.   1. 

3  lloni.  xv.  20. 


-•  iv.  12,  ix.  10,  iii.  9,  vii.  5  and  0. 
1  Cf.  Acts  xviii.  2. 


§  S.]  THE    EPISTLE   TO   THE    ROMANS  115 

and  the  Christians  of  Rome  might  have  combined  an  extrac- 
tion mainly  Gentile  with  a  disposition  entirely  or  mainly 
Jewish.  Nevertheless,  the  '  strong '  of  chap.  xiv.  fol.,  who 
confessedly  form  the  majority,  hold  a  faith  which  allows  them 
to  eat  everything,  and  not  meat  alone,  without  distinction,1  and 
which  observes  no  particular  day,  such  as  the  Sabbath,  more 
than  any  other 2 ;  hence  they  had  placed  themselves  in  a 
position  of  greater  freedom  towards  the  Law  than  any 
Proselytes,  and  constituted  a  Gentile  Christian  community 
emancipated  from  the  Law  and  growing  wild,  so  to  speak, 
independently  of  Paul  and  certainly  without  his  profound 
justifications  for  such  an  attitude.  We  must  not  even 
assert  that  the  minority  of  '  weak '  brethren  represented  a 
Judaistic  party.  For  they  shrank  altogether  from  eating 
meat  and  from  drinking  wine,  a  fact  which  points  to  the 
ascetic  scrupulosity  which  was  so  common  a  feature  of  the 
times,  rather  than  to  Pharisaic  strictness.  At  any  rate,  Paul 
did  not  look  upon  the  weak  brethren  as  representatives  of 
that  Judaism  which  declared  the  works  of  the  Law  necessary 
to  salvation,  for  in  that  case  he  could  not  without  compro- 
mising himself  have  met  them  so  far  as  he  does  in  xiv. 
21  fol.  ;  he  treats  them  rather  as  Christians  who,  having 
begun  their  progress  towards  a  complete  freedom  of  belief,  had 
attained  to  all  but  the  highest  step. 

But  what,  then,  could  have  led  the  Apostle,  who  in 
chap.  xiv.  fol.  warns  his  readers  in  the  name  of  brotherly 
love  against  an  exaggeration  of  the  sense  of  freedom,  to 
defend  himself  as  far  as  chap.  xi.  of  the  same  Epistle  almost 
exclusively  against  a  condemnation  of  his  gospel  which  is  only 
conceivable  as  coming  from  Jewish  quarters  ?  Must  we  not 
assign  chaps,  xii.  fol.  to  a  different  epistle  from  chaps,  i.-xi., 
since  in  the  recipients  of  the  two  sections  exactly  opposite 
errors  or  faults  seem  to  be  pre-supposed  ?  Can  the  '  judges ' 
of  chap.  ii.  be  identified  with  those  of  chap.  xiv.  ?  Or  was  the 
community  addressed  in  i.-xi.  really  independent  of  the 
Law,  while  Paul  was  merely  strengthening  it  against  possible 
Judaistic  attacks,  by  laying  before  it  a  careful  exposition 
of  the  whole  state  of  the  case?  Yet  if  on  his  migra- 

1  xiv.  2.  •  xiv.  5. 

i  2 


116       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  i. 

tion  to  the  West  Paul  only  recalled  the  fact  that  the 
Judaistic  propaganda  had  up  to  that  time  always  followed  on 
his  track,  and  if  he  wished  to  prevent  the  possibility  of  its 
establishing  itself  in  Eome  too  behind  his  back,  why  did  he 
not  prefer  to  prosecute  this  task  of  prevention  personally  and 
effectively,  where,-  as  in  this  case,  there  was  no  danger  in  delay  ? 
No,  there  is  only  one  way  of  regarding  the  Epistle  as  a  ivhole 
and  as  an  actual  letter,  such  as  Paul  knew  how  to  write,  and 
that  is  by  supposing  that  Paul  had  some  reason  for  setting  at 
rest,  before  his  arrival  in  Rome,  certain  prejudices  which  would 
have  made  his  labours  there  fruitless  or  unsatisfactory,  and 
that  to  this  end  he  chose  to  make  a  calm  and  complete  state- 
ment and  justification  of  his  attitude  towards  the  Law  and 
towards  Judaism.  We  had  better  refrain  from  making  guesses 
at  the  Judaistic  party's  plan  of  campaign,  which  we  simply  do 
not  know,  and  from  speculating  as  to  the  arrangements  it  had 
made  for  procuring  the  Apostle  of  the  Gentiles,  whose  latest 
plans  must  already  have  been  known  to  it,  the  reception  it 
desired  for  him  in  the  capital  of  the  West.  Not  a  word  in  the 
first  fifteen  chapters  of  the  Epistle  points  to  any  conspiracy  of 
slanderers  whose  wiles  Paul  was  trying  to  expose ;  he  merely 
contends  indirectly  against  the  ideas  entertained  by  the  Romans 
concerning  him  and  his  Gospel,  without  troubling  himself  as 
to  their  origin, — for  in  the  end  it  could  only  be  a  question  of 
the  one  constant  source.  Thus  the  Christians  of  Rome  were 
told  that  Paul  spurned  the  Law  of  God,1  that  his  teaching 
said  '  Let  us  do  evil,  that  good  may  come,' 2  and  that  he 
directly  encouraged  sin  in  the  name  of  Grace.3  He  aroused 
reproach  and  astonishment  as  a  Jew  now  hostile  to  the  Jews  : 
an  apostate  who  delighted  in  proclaiming  the  exclusion  of 
his  own  people  from  salvation  4 ;  and  the  wild  jubilation,  it 
may  be,  of  a,  few  fanatical  Gentile  Christians  r>  over  this  final 
settlement  with  the  accursed  Israel,  did  but  wound  ami 
alienate  the  Jewish  Christian  minority  and  the  friends  of 
peace  still  more. 

Who  was  there,  under  these  circumstances,  to  undertake 
the  defence  of  Paul  and  his  gospel,  if  there  was  so  little 


1   iii.  31,  vii.  7. 
«  Chaps,  ix.-xi. 


*  iii.  8. 
s  xi.  13. 


\i.  1  and  15. 


§  8.]  TIIK    KPISTLE    TO    THE    ROMANS  117 

knowledge  of  him  among  the  Christians  of  Rome,  such  a 
want  of  understanding  on  both  sides  of  the  essence  of  his 
teaching  ?     The  question  would  indeed  be  beside  the  mark,  if 
Romans  xvi.  were  genuine,  and  a  large  number  of  Paul's 
personal  adherents,  including  Aquila  and  Prisca,  were  settled 
in  Rome  ;  in  that  case  we  should  practically  be  reduced  to 
seeking  the  motive  for  the  Epistle  in  the  fact  that  these  had 
advised  him  to  disarm  the  suspicions  of  the  majority  in  the 
city,  by  a  judicious  and  conciliatory  letter,  before  he  himself 
appeared,  since  they  had  as  yet  fought  these  suspicions  in 
vain.     But  not  a  trace  of  the  anxiety  which  Paul  must  in 
that  case  be  assumed  to  have  felt  is  to  be  found  in  Romans ; 
only  in  chap.  ix.  does  he  show  some  anger  at  the  thought  of 
the  gross  misunderstanding  which  the  charge  against  him  of 
lack  of  patriotism  implied,  but  even  there  he  soon  recovers 
the  tone  of  the  teacher,  the  prophet,  the  rapt  interpreter  of  the 
mysteries  of  God  :  the  role  of  defendant  he  does  not  assume. 
The  objects,  then,  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  were :  to 
announce    Paul's    approaching   visit,   to   contradict    certain 
natural  but  false  suppositions  as  to  the  motive  for  this  visit, 
and  above  all  to  prepare  the  ground  for  it  skilfully  and  well. 
Paul  wished  to  be  received  as  brother  and  Apostle  in  the 
world's  capital — which  he  could  ill  do  without  as  his  base  of 
operations  for  the  conquest  of  the  West — and  not,  as  else- 
where, to  find  himself  involved  at  the  outset  in  vexatious 
wmnglings.     He  set  about  his  task  in  the  right  way  :  up  to 
this  time  the  Romans  had  judged  him  upon  hearsay,  but  now 
they  should  learn  what  was  the  substance  and  the  manner  of 
his  preaching,  they  should  decide  according  to  their  Christian 
conscience  whether  what  he   offered  them  were  '  tidings 
great  joy '  or  not,  and  whether  they  had  been  given  a  faithful 
or  a  false   picture   of    him   and   of   his  fundamental  ideas. 
They  were  not  of  those  who  clung  to  the  Law  on  principle ; 
they  recognised  as  clearly  as  he  the  universality  of  salvation  ; 
and   therefore   Paul   was   confident    that   after   reading   his 
Epistle — even  if  they  did  not  understand  it  all — they  would 
no  longer  be  able  to  deny  him  the  possession  of  the  Spirit, 
but  that  they  must  feel  the  plenteous  influence  therein  of 
'  spiritual  gifts.'     And  in  truth  Paul  could  not  have  acted 


118      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  j. 

with  greater  skill.  This  Epistle  probably  fulfilled  its  task 
better  than  any  of  his  others,  for  here  the  whole  man  is 
revealed  to  us.  In  chaps,  i.-iv.  we  have  the  Kabbinical 
schoolman,  in  viii.  and  xi.  the  inspired  poet,  in  xiii.  and  xiv. 
the  sober,  careful  director  of  conduct,  and  in  ix.  the  bold 
thinker  who  follows  out  to  its  logical  conclusion  the  argument 
which  makes  all  things  begin  and  end  in  God.  The  Eomans 
would  not  be  able  to  disregard  such  a  man  or  to  lock  their 
hearts  against  him,  unless  they  had  previously  determined 
to  make  no  terms  with  him  whatever.  A  small  knot  of  irre- 
concilables  may  even  yet  have  remained,  but  the  community 
proper  looked  up  to  Paul  as  their  Apostle  from  the  moment 
this  Epistle  reached  them. 


§  9.   The  Epistle  to  the  Philippians. 

[Cf.  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  vols.  viii.  and  ix.,  4  :  Philippians  by 
Haupt  (1897) ,  together  with  Colossians,  Philemon  and  Ephesians  and 
an  Introduction  of  104  pages  entitled  '  Die  Gefangenschaftsbriefe 
neu  bearbeitet.'  In  the  '  Hand-Commentar,'  Galatians,  Eomans  and 
Philippians  are  undertaken  by  E.  A.  Lipsius  (vol.  ii.,  2,  1892).  See 
also  the  '  International  Critical  Commentary,'  by  M.  Vincent 
(1897).  For  special  commentaries  see  B.  Weiss  (1859),  J.  B. 
Lightfoot  (1896),  and  A.  Klopper  (1893) ;  also  C.  Holsten's  investi- 
gation in  the  '  Jahrbiicher  fur  protestantische  Theologie '  (1875 
and  1876),  in  which  he  sides  with  those  who  dispute  the  authen- 
ticity.] 

1.  The  Epistle  to  the  Philippians  is  written  with  unusual 
warmth,  in  a  tone  almost  of  familiarity,  and  with  a  certain  lack 
of  form.  In  it  Paul  opens  his  heart  freely,  and  hence  his  sub- 
jects and  moods  are  variable.  But  the  writer  who,  even  with 
this  simplicity,  has  such  marvellous  power  to  exalt  and  edit'y 
becomes  only  the  more  dear  to  us  ;  his  tenderness  is  never 
shown  more  abundantly  than  in  the  way  in  which  he  speaks 
of  the  gift  bestowed  on  him  by  the  Philippians,  nowhere  is  his 
*  spiritual  gift '  of  treating  even  the  small  events  of  common 
intercourse  in  a  lofty  way,  and  of  illuminating  them  with  his 
religious  idealism,  more  brilliantly  manifested. 


§  9.]  THE    EPISTLE    TO    THK    I'JIILIPPIANS  119 

After  the  address  and  greeting ]  and  the  thanksgiving 
and  prayer  for  the  community,2  he  informs  his  readers  as  to 
the  state  of  his  own  affairs  and  as  to  his  experiences  and 
prospects.3  To  this 4  he  skilfully  appends  the  exhortation : 
by  looking  on  Jesus  as  the  example  of  lowliness  and  self- 
sacrifice,  nay  even  as  a  personal  joy  and  glory  to  himself, 
they  are  to  put  an  end  to  the  factiousness  of  their  common  life. 
Next  he  announces  the  approaching  visit  of  Timothy  and  the 
return  of  the  faithful  Epaphroditus,  lately  recovered  from  a 
serious  illness,5  and  with  the  charge,  '  Finally,  my  brethren, 
rejoice  in  the  Lord,' G  takes  up  his  exhortation  once  more.7 
In  the  first  place  we  have  an  urgent  appeal  to  his  readers  to 
seek  their  progress  only  along  the  path  in  which  they  now 
stand,8  and  above  all  things  not  to  renounce  their  high 
spiritual  possessions— righteousness  through  faith,  perfection, 
knowledge — for  the  sake  of  the  pitiful  glory  of  a  carnal 
circumcision  and  of  a  supposed  righteousness  through  the 
Law.  Then  follow 9  certain  special  exhortations  to  individual 
members  of  the  community,  viz.  to  two  women  who,  though 
they  had  laboured  zealously  for  the  Gospel,  had  recently 
fallen  out  one  with  another.  In  iv.  4  and  again  in  iv.  8  Paul 
rouses  himself  to  bid  a  particularly  warm  and  vigorous  fare- 
well, but  returns  again  in  vv.  10-20  to  express  his  grateful 
joy  in  the  Philippians'  gift,  which,  he  declares,  was  precious  to 
him,  not  for  its  assistance  in  his  own  need,  but  as  the  fruit  of 
their  faith.  Greetings  and  salutations  end  the  Epistle.10 

2.  At  Philippi,  an  inland  town  in  eastern  Macedonia, 
Paul  had  preached  at  the  time  he  first  set  foot  on  the  soil  of 
Europe  ;  there  he  had  been  shamefully  ill-treated  and  finally 
driven  from  the  town,11  but  he  had  left  behind  him  a  com- 
munity so  faithfully  attached  that  when  he  was  at  Thessa- 
lonica  it  had  twice  already  sent  him  voluntary  help,  and 
afterwards  did  so  yet  again.12  Since  he  never  accepted  monev 


1  i.  1  fol.  2  i.  3-11.  3  i.  12-26. 

4  i.  27-ii.  18.  5  ii.  19-30.  6  iii.  1. 

7  iii.  1-iv.  9.  9  iii.  16.  •  iv.  2  fol. 

10  iv.  21-23.  "  1  Thess.  ii.  2. 

12  Philipp.  iv.  15  fol. ;  2  Cor.  xi.  8  and  9. 


120      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  I. 

from  other  communities,  the  relations  he  had  had  with  the 
Philippians  since  the  '  beginning  of  the  gospel '  l  (these  words 
being  spoken,  of  course,  from  their  point  of  view)  had  always 
been  unique.  For  some  time  after  this  they  had  had  no 
further  opportunity  of  proving  their  zeal  for  their  beloved 
Apostle,  but  the  relations  between  them  had  not  grown  cold.2 
Now 3  the  Philippians  had  sent  a  gift  to  Paul  through 
Epaphroditus,  a  member  of  their  community,  and  had 
strictly  charged  the  latter  to  stay  and  render  personal 
service  to  the  Apostle.4  Their  messenger  had,  however, 
become  dangerously  ill,  and  was  besides  tormented  with 
home-sickness,  so  that  Paul  considered  it  his  duty  to  send 
him  back  as  soon  as  he  was  recovered.  But  whether  the 
Philippians,  who  had  heard  of  his  illness,5  had  made  inquiries 
after  him  by  letter  is  just  as  impossible  to  determine  as 
the  question  whether  their  '  gift  of  love '  was  accompanied 
by  a  joint  epistle  or  not.  Paul  makes  no  reference  whatever 
to  any  epistle  of  theirs.  He  had  enough  reason  for  writing 
to  them  without  this  ;  he  must  provide  Epaphroditus,  who 
had,  after  all,  only  half  fulfilled  his  mission,  with  a  letter  of 
excuse  ;  he  must  express  his  thanks  for  their  gift,  give  them 
the  desired  information  as  to  the  state  of  his  suit,  report 
to  them  as  to  his  present  condition  and  his  prospects,  and, 
since  he  had  heard  of  their  earnest  longing  for  another  visit, 
at  all  events  promise  them  an  equivalent — the  approaching 
visit  of  Timothy.  That  he  would  not  do  this  without 
adding  to  it  '  some  spiritual  gift '  for  their  encouragement 
needs  no  explanation ;  some  of  their  faults  he  may  have 
heard  of  through  Epaphroditus,  and  others  he  may  have 
contended  against  more  than  once  already ;  at  any  rate  he 
knows  how  to  discharge  this  duty  as  well  as  the  others  in  a 
paternal  spirit. 

The  question  as  to  whether  the  community  consisted  of 
Gentile  or  Jewish  Christians  need  concern  us  little,  however 
probable  the  former  may  be,  even  from  iii.  3  fol.  In  any 
case  it  adhered  implicitly  to  Paul,''  and  the  divisions  that 
existed  in  it  were  mainly  founded  on  personal  vanities  and 

1  iv.  15.  *  iv.  1,  i.  8.  »  iv.  14  and  18. 

4  ii.  30.  *  ii.  26.  '•  ii.  12,  iii.  17. 


§  9.]  TIIK    Kl'lSTLE    TO    THE    PHILIPPIANS  121 

jealousies.  Even  at  Philippi,  however,  everything  was  not 
perfect '  ;  but  the  '  dogs,  the  evil  workers,  the  concision,' 
against  whom  Paul  breaks  out  so  fiercely  in  iii.  2,  were 
certainly  not  members  of  the  community,  but  agitators  from 
outside,  new-made  Proselytes,  who  sought  to  advance  the 
cause  of  Moses  amid  the  religious  ferment  of  such  societies. 
This  exhortation  is  not  sufficient  evidence  from  which  to  con- 
clude that  the  Philippians  were  inclined  towards  Judaising. 
If  Paul  means  by  those  'who  mind  earthly  things,  whose 
god  is  the  belly,'  of  iii.  18  fol.,  the  same  persons  as  those 
he  attacks  in  iii.  2 — and  the  *  enemies  of  the  Cross  of 
Christ '  could  scarcely  have  been  degenerate  though  professing 
Christians — then  we  must  conclude  that  he  had  already 
warned  the  Philippians  of  the  '  evil  workers  'etc.,  and  they  are 
either  to  be  found  not  far  removed  from  the  '  adversaries '  of 
i.  28  (that  is,  in  a  powerful  Jewish  community  at  Philippi, 
intent  upon  suppressing  its  Christian  rival),  or  else  we  must 
assume  that  a  Judaistic  agitation  pure  and  simple — like  that  in 
Galatia — was  still  going  on  in  the  East,  and  that  Paul  looked 
upon  it  as  on  a  level  with  unbelieving  Judaism  itself,  if  not 
even  below  it.  In  either  case  no  more  is  implied  as  to  the 
attitude  of  the  Philippians  towards  matters  of  faith  than  that 
the  Apostle,  already  inclined  as  he  was  to  look  on  the  dark 
side  of  things,  did  not  credit  all  members  of  the  com- 
munity with  so  mature  a  knowledge  as  to  be  proof  against 
every  argument  that  these  agitators  could  bring  forward. 
Paul  knew  how  lovingly  the  community  clung  to  him,  and 
that  his  word  had  absolute  authority  over  it ;  as  long  as  he 
lived,  indeed,  it  would  not  fall ;  but  what  if  he  were  now  to  be 
called  away  ?  For  this  contingency,  then,  the  faithful  of 
Philippi  shall  possess  a  testament  from  him  which  leaves 
nothing  to  be  desired  in  point  of  clearness.  If  seducers  press 
upon  them,  they  shall  know — even  though  Paul  himself  can 
no  longer  be  asked  for  counsel — what  his  opinion  of  their 
tempters'  religion  and  morals  had  been,  so  that  even  if  their 
judgment  waver,  piety  towards  himself  may  keep  them  in  the 
right  way. 

1  iii.  15,  16  ;  ii.  12. 


122      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

3.  Paul  was  a  prisoner  when  he  wrote  the  Epistle,1  and 
moreover  the  words  '  praetorian  guard' 2  and  '  they  that  are 
of  Caesar's  household  ' :-  point  decidedly  towards  the  Roman 
imprisonment.     His  expectation,  too,  of  a  speedy  termination 
to  his  suit 4  would  fit   Kome  better  than  Caesarea,  and  still 
more  would  the  fact  that  he  was  once  more  directing  hif 
thoughts,  in  the  event  of  his  being  set  at  liberty,  towards  a 
journey  to  his  old  communities,"'  whereas  from  Caesarea  he 
must    have   turned   them    towards    Kome.     From   i.    14   it 
appears  that  he  was  surrounded  by  a  considerable  Christian 
community,  from  which  he  can  send  greetings  to  Philippic 
As  a  prisoner  he  could  not,  of  course,  have  had  direct  relations 
with  this  whole  body,  but  he  had  special  friends  among  his 
guards,  and  even  his  older  fellow-workers  had  not,  according 
to  ii.  20  fol.,  all  forsaken  him.     He  complains,7  however,  oi 
a  minority  who  preached  Christ  out  of  evil  motives  of  env; 
and  strife — his  imprisonment  having  naturally  left  the  fiek 
open  to  them.     He  does  not  expressly  say  that  these 
belonged  to  his  immediate   vicinity,  but  if  their  intentioi 
really  was  to  '  raise  up  affliction  '  for  him  '  in  his  bonds  '  b; 
their  proceedings,  we  should  certainly  look  for  them  in  Rome. 
What  they  preached  was  not  a  false  gospel,  so  that  they  must 
have   disclosed   their   possible   Judaistic  leanings  still  more 
cautiously  than  had  Paul's  Corinthian  adversaries,  and  th< 
Roman  community,  on   which  Paul  was   in   no   position 
press  the  true  wine,  and  with  which  he  was  not  on  terms  of 
personal   intimacy,  entertained  no  suspicions  against  them. 
It  seems  probable  under  these  circumstances  that  the  Epistl 
should  be  placed  between  the  years  61  and  63,  but  of  thes< 
61  is  the  least  likely,   since  we  must  allow  time  for  thn 
events  :  the  Philippians  hear  of  the  arrival  of  Paul  in  Rom< 
they  send  a  gift  to  him  there,  and  the  bearer  of  it  falls  ill  an< 
recovers  again.     More  than  this,  however,  I  should  notventu] 
to  assert,  for  the  expressions  of  longing  for  death 8  are  certainly 
conceivable  from  Paul's  lips  before  the  last  months  of  his  life, 
while  the  complaint  of  ii.  20  fol.  against  all  his  entourage, 

1  i.  7,  13  fol.  and  17.  -  i.  13.  »  iv.  22. 

«  ii.  23.  *  ii.  24,  i.  25-27.         •  iv.  22". 

7  i.  15  and  17.  "  i.  20  fol. 


§  9.]  Til  1C    EPISTLE   TO    THE    PIUL11T1ANS  1^3 

with  the  exception  of  Timothy,  might  have  given  place  to  a 
more  cheerful  verdict,  supposing,  for  instance,  that  these 
companions  had  been  replaced  by  others  ;  \ve  need  not  neces- 
sarily regard  it  as  the  result  of  years  of  observation  and 
disappointed  hope.  And  the  '  all '  of  ii.  21  is  clearly  hyper- 
bolical. Paul  was  human,  after  all,  and  had  a  right  to  give 
utterance  in  his  epistles  even  to  passing  moods  and  feelings. 

4.  This  should  never  be  lost  sight  of  in  dealing  with  the 
attempts  of  some  critics  to  apply  the  pruning-knife  to  our 
Epistle.  The  theory  of  the  Tubingen  school,  that  the  whole 
Epistle  is  post-Pauline,  is  indeed  almost  universally  abandoned, 
for  the  language  corresponds  exactly  with  that  of  the  recognised 
Epistles,  while  the  tone  is  Pauline  beyond  the  possibility  of 
imitation.1  Any  difficulties  arising  from  the  doctrines  of 
Christology  and  Soteriology  of  ii.  6-11  and  iii.  6-11 — which 
are  held  to  represent  in  the  first  case  an  exaggeration  and  in 
the  second  a  relaxation  of  the  Pauline  conception — are  set  at 
rest  when  we  apply  an  unprejudiced  exegesis  to  the  passages 
in  question,  in  the  light  of  our  knowledge  that  Paul  did  not 
make  use  of  fixed  dogmatic  formulae,  but  of  religious  ex- 
periences which  could  admit  of  very  various  expression  and 
the  content  of  which  was  ever  growing  wider.  The  special 
mention  of  the  bishops  and  deacons  in  the  address2  was 
probably  owing  to  the  fact  that  they  had  managed  and 
carried  out  the  Collection  on  Paul's  behalf,  while  the  mere 
existence  of  such  Church  officials  is  not  more  suspicious  than 
that  of  the  men  '  who  are  over  you '  of  1.  Thessalonians/1 
More  remarkable  certainly  is  the  fact  that  the  anti-Pauline 
evangelists  are  here  judged  so  mildly  that  Paul  can  actually 
say  of  their  doings  '  Christ  is  proclaimed,'  !  and  can  therefore 
rejoice  in  them  still,  whereas  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians 
he  had  cursed  them.  But  is  not  the  same  idea  expressed  in 
2.  Corinthians  xi.  4,  only  in  different  words,  and  may  not 
personal  experience  have  convinced  the  Apostle  that  a  large 
number  of  his  opponents  did  actually  help  to  spread  the 
Gospel  by  their  preaching  ?  Did  Paul's  enemies  consist  only 
of  bigoted  Judaists  ? 

Under  these  circumstances  other  critics  have  only  pointed 

1  i.  20  fol.,iv.  10  fol.  *  i.  1.  3  v.  12.  «  i.  15-18. 


124      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT       [CHAP.  i. 

to  the  directly  opposite  strain  in  which  the  adversaries  are 
disposed  of  in  chap,  iii.,  and  demand  that  since  such  con- 
tradictions are  inadmissible  in  so  short  a  letter,  we  should 
either  remove  certain  passages  as  interpolations,  or  rather 
that  we  should  divide  the  Epistle  into  two  documents  addressed 
to  Philippi  at  different  times.  In  this  case  it  was  most 
natural  to  mark  the  boundary  at  iii.  1  and  2,  where  it  must 
be  admitted  that  a  remarkable  change  of  tone  occurs.  Such 
an  hypothesis — no  matter  whether  chaps,  iii.  and  iv.  were 
then  held  to  form  the  later  or  the  earlier  epistle — is  certainly 
to  be  preferred  to  the  bold  venture  of  piecing  together  two 
Epistles  to  the  Philippians  out  of  fragments  lying  scattered 
through  all  the  four  chapters,  although  the  need  for  such  a 
flimsy  construction  testifies  again  to  the  impracticability  of 
the  first  hypothesis.  Both  classes  of  critics  consider  them- 
selves further  entitled  to  appeal  to  an  external  witness,  since 
Polycarp  in  his  Epistle  to  the  Philippians  l  speaks  of  '  epistles  ' 
of  Paul  to  that  community  which  they  would  do  well  to 
read  and  digest.  That  Paul  corresponded  frequently  with 
the  Philippians,  in  any  case,  will  hardly  be  doubted  even 
apart  from  the  words  of  iii.  1,  but  that  in  Poly  carp's  time 
there  should  have  existed  two  or  more  such  epistles  which 
were  only  later  pieced  together  into  our  present  Epistle  is 
impossible.  The  bishop  of  Smyrna  was  the  victim  of  some 
confusion,  or  else  his  plural  (strio-To^ai)  is  only  rhetorical,  or 
perhaps  generic,  like  the  '  other  churches '  of  2.  Corinthians  xi.  8. 
If,  however,  2.  Corinthians  can  best  be  understood  as  a  whole, 
there  can  be  no  possible  reason  for  the  dismemberment  of 
Philippians  ;  the  Apostle's  mood  had  simply  varied  as  he 
wrote,  had  alternated  between  eagerness  for  life  and  rejoicing 
in  death.  And  so — especially  under  the  influence,  perhaps, 
of  some  new  exasperating  experience — Paul  might  have 
directed  the  stormy  outbursts  of  iii.  2  fol.  against  the  same 
persons  as  those  whom,  from  another  point  of  view,  he  had 
j  udged  with  comparative  mildness,  say,  the  day  before.2  But  he 
has  not  the  same  foes  in  his  mind  in  these  two  passages  :  in 
chap.  i.  he  is  thinking  of  certain  persons  who  were  a  personal 
annoyance  to  himself ;  in  chap.  iii.  of  men  who  might  become 

1  iii.  2.  *  i.  15  fol. 


§  10.]  THE    EPISTLE   TO   PHILEMON 

dangerous  to  a  community  most  dear  to  him.  The  former 
were  helping,  though  unwillingly,  to  spread  the  word  of  the 
Cross ;  the  latter  were  exerting  all  their  strength  to  under- 
mine it.  Nevertheless,  the  passionate  tone  of  iii.  2  and  iii. 
18  fol.  will  always  be  remarkable,  since  there  is  apparently  no 
question  of  an  immediate  menace  to  the  faith  of  the  Philip- 
pians,  and  Paul's  picture  of  the  '  dogs '  is  drawn  rather  from 
recollections  of  past  struggles  ;  but  all  will  be  clear  if  we  give 
their  psychological  significance  to  the  moods  of  an  imprisoned, 
sickly  and  solitary  man. 

§  10.  The  Epistle  to  Philemon 

[Cf.  works  mentioned  in  next  section,  and  also,  for  inter- 
polations in  the  genuine  Epistle,  Holtzmann's  article  in  the 
'  Zeitschrift  fur  wissenschaftliche  Theologie  '  (1873)  entitled  '  Dei- 
Brief  an  Philemon  kritisch  untersucht '  (pp.  428).] 

This  little  note,  which  besides  the  address  and  farewell 
greetings  consists  of  merely  a  single  paragraph,  is  addressed 
to  an  individual  Christian  named  Philemon  ;  the  persons 
included  in  the  opening  greeting,  Apphia  and  Archippus,  are 
members  of  his  family,  and  around  this  again  a  house-com- 
munity, as  in  the  case  of  Aquila  and  Prisca  at  Ephesus,  has 
gathered.  A  certain  slave  of  Philemon's,  Onesimus  by  name, 
had  run  away  from  his  master,  perhaps  under  aggravating 
circumstances — i.e.  with  stolen  money1 — and  the  imprisoned 
Paul  had  succeeded  in  converting  him.  The  Apostle  now 
sends  him  back  to  his  master,  as  he  was  bound  to  do,  but 
entreats  the  latter  to  forgive  him  and  to  look  upon  him 
no  longer  as  a  slave,  but  as  a  brother.  Since  he  allows  it  to 
be  seen  how  gladly  he  would  have  kept  Onesimus  beside  him, 
and  how  Philemon  really  owed  him  some  such  requital  for 
his  conversion,  which  had  been  effected  by  Paul  himself,  it 
seems  that  he  expected  the  liberation  of  the  slave  as  the 
one  service  to  which,  for  the  sake  of  the  Gospel,  he  laid 
claim.  He  makes  no  demand,  however,  on  that  ground. 
According  to  Colossians  iv.  9,  Onesimus  was  a  Colossian,  and 
Archippus  also  belonged  to  that  city,  or  to  its  immediate 

1  Verse  18. 


126       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     TCHAP.  i. 


neighbourhood,1  so  that  we  must  look  for  the  head  of  the  family, 
Philemon,  at  Colossae  too.  It  is  true  that  Paul  had  never 
been  to  this  town  and  yet  seems  to  have  won  over  Philemon  to 
Christ,  but  a  man  so  well-to-do  would  have  travelled— at  least 
as  much  as  a  Chloe 2  or  a  Phcebe  3 — and  nothing  would  have 
been  more  natural  than  that  he  should  have  met  Paul  more 
than  once  on  such  occasions— e.g.  at  Ephesus. 

At  the  time  of  writing  the  Epistle  Paul  was  in  captivity,4 
but  was  not  hindered  from  doing  fruitful  work.5  This  alone 
might  speak  for  Kome  as  against  Caesarea,  but  the  impression 
is  further  strengthened  by  the  hope  expressed  by  Paul  in 
ver.  22  that  he  would  soon  be  able  to  claim  Philemon's 
hospitality.6  In  no  case  would  the  discrepancy  between  the 
plans  of  travel  in  Philippians  ii.  24  and  Philemon  22  (if  it  exists 
at  all)  compel  us  to  consider  Rome  in  the  former  case  and 
Caesarea  here  as  the  starting-points  of  the  proposed  journeys 
—as  though  Paul  were  bound  to  cling  fast  to  ideas  so  casually 
hinted  at  (for  they  are  really  nothing  more)  for  a  period  of 
perhaps  a  year.  Nor  need  we  rack  our  brains  to  decide 
whether  a  slave  escaping  from  Colossae  would  be  more  likely 
to  betake  himself  to  Kome,  with  all  its  hiding-places,  or  to 
Caesarea,  where  no  one  would  suspect  his  presence ;  for  his 
meeting  with  Paul  must  in  any  case  have  been  the  work  of 
chance.  Since  Timothy,  as  well  as  certain  other  brethren,  is 
here  staying  with  Paul,  as  in  Philippians,7  the  Epistle  should 
be  assigned  to  some  date  near  the  Epistle  to  the  Philippians, 
but  whether  a  trifle  earlier  or  later  is  not  to  be  determined. 
At  any  rate,  the  cheerful  temper  of  the  present  Epistle — which 
in  ver.  19  allows  the  writer  to  speak  in  harmless  jest — is 
not  necessarily  earlier  than  the  melancholy  thoughts  of 
Philippians.  The  Tubingen  school  have  pronounced  the 
Epistle  to  be  non-Pauline ;  they  consider  that  the  supposed 
later  author  was  aiming  at  a  settlement  of  the  slavery 
question  through  the  lips  of  Paul,  and  that  the  state  of  things 
implied  in  the  Epistle  is  a  little  too  romantic  to  be  true.  But 
the  whole  of  the  Apostle's  life  was  romantic  in  this  sense,  and 


1  Col.  iv.  17. 

*  Vv.  1  and  13. 

7  Philip,  i.  1,  i.  14  and  If,  IK. 


5  1  Cor.  i.  11. 
5  Ver.  10. 


3  Rom.  xvi.  1. 
9  See  p.  122. 


§  11.]     EPISTLES   TO    TUB    COLOSSIANS    AM)    HIMIKSIANS        127 

a  settlement  of  the  slavery  question,  which  one  almost  expects, 
is  precisely  what  the  writer  does  not  attempt ;  he  keeps  himself 
throughout  to  the  one  case  before  him,  and  does  not  even  there 
give  any  quite  unequivocal  decision.  As  far  as  form  and  contents 
are  concerned,  there  is  nothing  in  Philemon  unfavourable  to 
the  theory  of  its  authenticity,  and  it  is  probable  that  no  one 
would  have  questioned  it,  had  not  the  Epistle  been  injured  by 
its  close  connection  with  Colossians  and  Ephesians,  whose 
Pauline  authorship  it  was  thought  necessary  to  deny.  But 
how  could  a  forger  have  put  unfulfilled  hopes  1  into  the 
mouth  of  the  Apostle  ?  And  what  a  masterpiece  of  imitation 
would  the  whole  Epistle  present,  notably  vv.  15-20  !  The 
pedantic  doubts  of  later  theologians  as  to  the  canonical 
nature  and  the  inspiration  of  Philemon,  of  which  we  hear 
through  Jerome,  Chrysostom  and  Theodorus  Mopsuestenus, 
are  anything  rather  than  the  relics  of  primitive  tradition  ;  on 
the  contrary,  the  external  evidence  rather  confirms  the  witness 
borne  by  every  sentence  in  the  Epistle,  that  Philemon  belongs 
to  the  least  doubtful  part  of  the  Apostle's  work. 

§11.  The  Epistles  to  the  Colossians  and  Ephesians 

Cf.  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  vols.  viii.  and  ix.  2,  3,  in  which  Col., 
Ephes.  and  Philem.  are  undertaken  by  E.  Haupt  (1897) ;  Hand- 
Commentar,  vol.  iii.  1 ;  Col.  Ephes.  Philem.  and  the  Pastorals  by 
H.  von  Soden  (1893) ;  '  Internat.  Critical  Commentary '  (1897) ; 
Col.  and  Ephes.  by  T.  K.  Abbot.  Also  the  special  commen- 
taries of  J.  B.  Lightfoot,  1886  (for  Colossians  and  Philemon 
see  p.  44) ;  of  H.  Oltramare  (in  French,  published  at  Geneva, 
1891  and  1892)  on  Colossians,  Ephesians  and  Philemon  (the 
latter  a  very  conservative  although  in  parts  extremely  careful 
exegesis),  and  of  A.  Klopper,  Colossians  (1882)  and  Ephesians  (1891). 
The  critical  questions  are  stated  with  the  greatest  accuracy  and 
independently  discussed  in  H.  J.  Holtzmann's  '  Kritik  der  Epheser- 
und  Kolosserbriefe '  (1872)]. 

The  connection  between  these  two  Epistles  is  so  close 
that  they  must  be  treated  together.  Even  a  passing  glance 
at  their  contents  will  be  sufficient  to  show  this,  although^  by 

no  means  fully. 

1  Ver.  '2-2. 


128       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  i. 

1.  Colossians   begins  with  address    and  greeting.      The 
next  verses  contain  a  thanksgiving  for  the  conversion  of  the 
Colossians,  accomplished  by  Epaphras,  and  a  wish  for  the 
continual  improvement  of  their  standing  in  the  kingdom  of 
Christ,  the  mention  of  whose  name  immediately  calls  forth  a 
Christological  digression  l  upon  the  majesty  of  the  Son,  who  is 
the   source   of   all  blessings   and   transcends   all   greatness. 
Then 2  Paul  defines  his  own  task  within  this  kingdom — to 
proclaim   its    universality — and   tells   his   readers    that   he 
labours   and    struggles   especially    for   their   advancement.5 
After  this  preparation  he  assails  them  with  entreaties  not  to 
let  themselves  be  bewildered  again  by  teachers  who  deluded 
them  with  a  show  of  false  perfection  by  setting  all  manner  of 
misleading  human  wisdom  in  the  place  of  the  one  Christ,  and 
who  by  the  stress  they  laid  on  the  worship  of  angels  and 
certain  special  ascetic  and  ritual  observances  drew  them  away 
from  Christ,  their  head.4     How  to  serve  him  is  now  described 
in  the  practical  part  of  the  Epistle  5 — the  Colossians  must  be 
raised  above  all  earthly  things  and  '  the  old  man  with  his 
doings,'  they  must  put  on  the  spirit  of  Christ  in  love  and 
peace  and  in  joyful  thanksgiving  to  God  the  Father/5     Paul 
now  proceeds  to  specify  more  minutely  the  duties  of  man  and 
woman,  of  child  and  father,  of  servant  and  master 7 — it  is 
the  Christian's  domestic  code — and  then,  returning  to  the 
broader    tone,   he   urges  them   all    once  more  to  steadfast 
prayer — not  forgetting   the   work   to  which  he  himself  had 
been   called  -  and  bids  them  win  the  unconverted   through 
their  conduct  and  by  a  right  use  of  the  Word.8     Then  come 
personal  matters,  the  commendation  of  the  bearers,  greetings 
and  commands,  and  finally  the  farewell  written  with  his  own 
hand.9 

2.  Not  less  clearly  does  Epbesians  fall  into  two  parts  of 
equal  bulk,  the  one  theoretical  and  the  other  practical.     After 
the   address   and  blessing   of  vv.   1  and  2  there   follows   a 
very  lengthy  thanksgiving,1"  the  first  part  of  which  "  consists 


1  Vv.  14-23. 

«  ii.  4-23. 

:  iii.  18-iv.  1. 

10  i.  3-23. 


2  i.  24  -J'.i. 
»  Chap.  iii.  fol. 
8  iv.  2-6. 
11  Vv.  3-14. 


1  ii.  1  :?. 

*  iii.  1-17. 

•  iv.  7-18. 


§  11.]      EPISTLES   TO    THE    COLOSSIANS   AND    EPIIESIANS       120 

in  a  general  extolling  of  God  for  having  chosen  us  from 
the  beginning  of  his  own  free  will,  while  the  second  ' — for 
which  verse  12  is  a  preparation — is  concerned  more  parti- 
cularly with  the  readers,  for  whom  the  writer  declares  he 
gives  thanks  and  offers  prayers  continually,  because  they  had 
found  the  way  to  Christ,  the  universal  Lord  and  head  of 
their  Church.  From  death  by  sin  we  had  been  transported 
to  the  heavenly  world  of  the  risen  Christ — a  transformation 
accomplished  by  Grace  alone,  without  any  act  of  ours 2 — and 
the  fatal  barrier  between  the  heathen  *  under  the  flesh,'  to 
whom  the  Ephesians  once  belonged,  and  the  people  of 
promise,  was  now  done  away  by  the  blood  of  Christ.3  After 
the  destruction  of  those  ordinances  which  stirred  up  enmity 
and  created  the  gulf  between  'you  that  were  far  off'  and 
'  them  that  were  nigh,'  the  holy  temple  had  been  rebuilt 
upon  a  new  foundation,  and  all  who  had  obtained  access  to 
God  through  the  one  Spirit  were  made  use  of  in  equal 
measure  as  stones  in  the  building  thereof.1  The  glory  of  pro- 
claiming this  secret  of  the  joint  inheritance  of  the  Gentiles 
had  been  granted  to  him,  Paul,  the  prisoner  of  the  Lord,5 
and  he  therefore  prayed  that  they,  far  from  losing  heart  at 
his  bonds,  would  become  ever  more  perfect  in  faith,  love  and 
knowledge.  With  the  doxology  of  iii.  20  the  writer  returns 
to  the  point  from  which  he  started  6 ;  in  reality  the  whole  of 
this  first  part  of  the  Epistle  is  merely  an  unusually  elaborate 
parallel  to  the  thanksgivings  with  which  Paul  always  loved 
to  preface  his  Epistles — a  solemn  contemplation  of  the  majesty 
which,  through  Christ,  had  given  mankind  the  Gospel  of 
atonement,  of  re-creation  and  of  peace. 

The  exhortation  now  begins 7  with  an  injunction  to  the 
readers  to  give  practical  proof  of  the  restored  unity  of  the 
Spirit  in  all  lowliness,  steadfastness  and  love,  and  to  root  out 
every  trace  of  the  old  heathen  life.8  Paul  then  proceeds  to 
warn  them  more  particularly  against  falsehood,  wrath,  stealing, 
corrupt  speech  and  an  unforgiving  heart,9  and  in  the  next 
two  verses  holds  up  God  and  the  love  of  Christ  as  the  models 

1  Vv.  15  fol.  -  ii.  1-10.  3  ii.  11-13. 

1  ii.  14-22.  ••»  iii.  1-12.  6  i.  3  fol. 

7  iv.  1-10.  •  iv.  17-24.  9  iv.  25-32. 


130      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT       [CHAP.  i. 

after  which  his  readers  were  to  strive.  Then  come  some 
further  moral  precepts  in  the  same  strain  as  those  of  chap.  iv. l  ; 
once  more  the  contrast  is  vividly  brought  out  between  what 
was  and  what  is,  between  unclean  and  clean,  darkness  and 
light,  foolish  and  wise.  This  is  followed  by  a  domestic  code  - 
touching  upon  the  various  classes  in  the  same  order  as  that 
of  Colossians  iii.  18,  and  then,  in  a  boldly  drawn  picture  of 
the  putting  on  of  the  spiritual  armour,3  the  Apostle  spurs  his 
readers  to  battle  against  the  powers  of  evil  both  of  the  natural 
and  the  supernatural  worlds,  and  urges  them  to  make  supplica- 
tion on  his  behalf,  seeing  how  eagerly  he  longed  to  be  free  once 
more  to  take  part  in  such  a  fight.  After  a  word  of  commendation 
for  the  bearer,  Tychicus,4  the  Epistle  ends  with  a  benediction. 
3.  If  we  assume  that  both  Epistles  are  authentic  there  can 
be  no  doubt  as  to  the  date  of  their  composition.  Paul  is  a 
prisoner, :i  and  he  sends  the  Epistles  by  the  hand  of  Tychicus, (i 
whose  station  and  business  are  described  in  both  Epistles  in 
almost  identical  terms.  This  alone  would  be  enough  to  prove 
their  nearly  simultaneous  composition.  That  Timothy  is  not 
named  in  Ephesians,  as  he  is  in  Colossians, 7  as  joint  writer  of 
the  Epistle,  is  no  greater  discrepancy  than  that  the  last 
chapter  of  Ephesians  differs  from  Colossians 8  in  not  containing 
any  special  greetings  ;  we  are  not  to  conclude  from  it  that 
Paul  was  in  different  circumstances,  but  only  that  different 
relations  subsisted  between  him  and  his  addressees.  Colossians, 
again,  is  intimately  connected  through  Onesimus  with  the 
Epistle  to  Philemon,  for  Onesimus  was  to  arrive  at  Colossse 
in  company  with  Tychicus 9  and  would  certainly  have  been 
charged  with  the  latter  document ;  in  both,  Paul  and  Timothy 
are  the  joint  authors,  and  in  both  Paul  sends  greetings  from 
Epaphras,  Mark,  Aristarchus,  Demas  and  Luke.  Jesus  Justus 
is  the  only  person  mentioned  in  Colossians  10  who  does  not 
appear  in  Philemon,  but  this  is  probably  only  because  he  was 
personally  unknown  to  the  readers  of  the  latter ;  while  as 
to  Paul's  '  fellow-prisoners,'  his  friends  may  very  likely  have 

1  v.  3-21.  *  v.  22-vi.  0.  '  vi.  10-20. 

1  vi.  21  fol.  5  Col.  iv.  3  and  18 ;  Epb.  iii.  1  and  vi.  19  fol. 

•  Col.  iv.  7  fol. ;  Eph.  vi.  21  fol.  ;  i.  1. 

-  iv.  10  fol.  •  iv.  9.  I0  iv.  11. 


§  11.]       EPISTLES   TO   THE    COLOSSIANS   AND    EPIIKS1ANS      131 

relieved  each  other  in  that  capacity,  so  that  the  different 
application  of  the  title  in  the  two  Epistles  '  need  not  surprise 
us.  As  to  the  relation  between  these  three  Epistles  and 
Philippians  it  is  best  not  to  dogmatise  ;  but  the  mournful  tone 
of  the  latter  might  easily  -have  given  place  to  the  more 
cheerful  mood  of  Colossians  and  Philemon,  especially  as  in 
Philippians  itself  it  does  not  last  throughout  the  Epistle. - 
And  in  Col.  iv.  11  there  is  certainly  a  slight  echo  of  the 
bitter  tone  of  Philip,  ii.  20  fol.  At  any  rate,  we  must  assign  a 
common  date  to  Philemon,  Colossians  and  Ephesians,  and  in 
all  probability  Paul  wrote  them  at  Rome  in  the  year  62  or  63. 
Some  time  in  the  sixties  the  country  round  the  Lycus,  where 
Colossae  lies,  was  visited  by  a  terrible  earthquake,  and  if  Paul 
had  known  of  this  he  would  probably  have  mentioned  it  in 
the  Epistle  to  the  Colossians  ;  but  there  is  so  much  uncertainty 
about  the  date  of  this  earthquake  that  we  cannot  derive  any 
help  from  it  towards  the  chronology  of  our  Epistles. 

4.  The  town  of  Colossae  lay  in  South-West  Phrygia,  in  the 
fertile  valley  of  the  Lycus,  quite  close  to  two  larger  cities, 
Laodicea  and  Hierapolis,  whose  Christian  communities,  it 
seems,  carried  on  an  active  intercourse  and  exchange  of 
communications  with  that  of  Colossae.3  Probably  they  all 
arose  in  the  same  way  '  and  followed  similar  lines  of  develop- 
ment. They  did  not  belong  to  the  churches  founded  by  Paul 
himself,  even  though  a  few  individual  members  might  have 
received  their  faith  from  him, 5  for  according  to  ii.  1  Paul  had 
never  seen  Colossae.  Their  founder  seems  to  have  been  a 
Colossian  named  Epaphras, 6  probably  a  disciple  of  Paul,  but 
at  any  rate  one  who  proclaimed  the  gospel  there  in  Paul's  own 
manner.7  How  long  these  communities  had  already  existed 
is  not  be  determined  from  the  Epistle,  and  we  possess  no  other 
evidence.  But  since  their  founder  was  a  Gentile  Christian  8 
we  may  consider  the  communities  also  to  have  been  such,  and 
passages  like  i.  21  and  27  and  especially  ii.  13  confirm  this 
view.  Some  time  before,  this  said  Epaphras  had  come  to 

1  Col.  iv.  10  ;  Philem.  23.  2  See  p.  123. 

3  Col.  iv.  13  and  15  fol.,  ii.  1.  4  Col.  iv.  13. 

5  Philem.  19.  e  Col.  i.  7,  iv.  12. 

7  i.  4,  7  fol.,  ii.  5  fol.  8  iv.  11  and  12. 

K  2 


132      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

Rome  from  Colossae  to  visit  Paul,  and  had  been  able,  in  the 
name  of  the  community,  to  give  proof  of  its  sympathy  with 
the  Apostle  and  to  deliver  a  report l  of  the  state  of  affairs 
there  which  was  on  the  whole  extremely  satisfactory.  It  was 
natural,  therefore — if  only  because  the  Colossians  were  now 
deprived  of  their  valued  leader — that  when  an  opportunity 
arose,  such  as  was  afforded  by  the  sending  back  of  Onesimus 
(while  Tychicus,  too,  was  instructed  to  pass  through  Colossae), 
Paul  should  thank  them  for  their  love  and  self-sacrifice,  should 
assure  them  of  the  warm  love  he  bore  them  in  return  and 
should  urge  them  to  continue  along  the  path  of  righteousness. 
Part  of  the  Epistle  would  thus  be  quite  adequately  accounted 
for.  There  was,  however,  something  besides  this  which  the 
Apostle  of  the  Gentiles  seems  to  have  considered  himself  in 
duty  bound  to  impress  upon  the  Colossians  with  the  whole 
weight  of  his  authority.  False  brethren  had  appeared  in  the 
community,  and  there  was  some  danger  lest  when  left  to  itself 
it  should  gradually  fall  into  the  power  of  these  men.  Whether 
Epaphras  had  already  striven  against  them,  but  without 
success,  or  whether  they  had  not  made  their  appearance  until 
after  his  departure,  so  that  the  news  of  their  proceedings  had 
reached  him — and  through  him  Paul — but  recently,  we  do 
not  learn.  At  any  rate,  to  unmask  these  apparently  harmless 
innovators,  to  proclaim  them  dangerous  seducers,  and  to 
shield  his  own  gospel  against  such  corruption  were  among  the 
principal  objects  of  the  Epistle. 

5.  In  the  picture  of  these  '  false  brethren '  of  Colossae  the 
mingling  of  different  features  is  very  remarkable.  The 
emphasis  with  which  Paul  impresses  upon  his  readers  that 
they  were  *  circumcised  with  a  circumcision  not  made  with 
hands,' 2  the  stress  which  he  lays  upon  faith  and  baptism/' 
the  declaration  especially  that  the  '  bond  which  was  against 
us  ' — i.e.  the  Commandments — had  been  nailed  to  the  Cross 
and  therefore  done  away  with/  and  the  warning  against  the 
distinctions  made  in  foods  and  days — feast-days,  new  moons 
and  Sabbaths  •'• —  all  recall  the  Judaistic  agitators  with  whom  we 
are  best  acquainted  through  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians.  And 


1  ii.  r>. 
'  ii.  14. 


ii.  11. 
ii.  1<). 


s  ii.  12. 


§  ]!.]       EPISTLES   TO    THE    COLOSSIANS    AND    KPIIESIANS       133 

their  transferring  the  position  due  to  Christ  to  the  '  rudiments 
of  the  world  '  l  reminds  us  directly  of  Galatians  iv.  3  and  9. 
But  their  love  of  classifying  both  meat  and  drink,12  and  their 
ascetic  tendencies  and  anxieties  3  do  not  exhibit  the  manners 
of  strict  Pharisaism,  but  rather  the  fundamental  qualities  of 
a  mystical  form  of  piety  such  as  that  of  the  '  weak  '  of 
Eomans  xiv.  The  reproach  that  they  had  sought  to  mislead 
the  Colossians  by  the  tradition  or  the  doctrines  of  men  '  —  which 
cannot  be  explained  in  this  context  by  Mark  vii.  8  —  and  by 
1  philosophy  and  vain  deceit  '  h  takes  us  still  further  away 
from  Judaism.  Paul  would  not  have  called  the  service  of 
the  Law  '  will-  worship  '  (i6e\o0pr)crKLa),6  but  a  more  exact 
definition  of  this  may  be  found  in  ii.  18,  where  besides 
hypocrisy  or  artificial  humility  (Ta7rswo<f>poavv7j},  he  warns 
his  readers  against  the  worship  of  angels  (0prja-KLa  r&v 
ayys\wv)  which  some  had  attempted  to  impose  upon  them  by 
appeals  to  fictitious  revelations. 

The  Apostle  himself  was  not  attacked  by  these  false 
brethren.  It  is  true  that  he  repeatedly  emphasises  his 
deserts  7  and  his  right  of  ministry  in  the  Gospel,8  but  one  is 
left  with  the  impression  that  he  did  not  intend  thereby  to 
ward  off  attacks  from  outside  so  much  as  to  strengthen  the 
belief  of  his  readers  positively  in  his  own  right  and  power  to 
instruct  them.  The  innovators  of  Colossae  had  not  branded 
the  faith  held  till  then  by  the  community  as  a  false  but  as  an 
incomplete  Christianity  ;  they  belonged  to  the  class  which 
according  to  1.  Cor.  iii.  12  sought  to  build  up  hay  and 
stubble  upon  the  unchanging  foundation  of  the  faith  ;  they 
flattered  themselves  that  they  had  reached  a  higher  stage  of 
Christian  knowledge,  and  offered  to  initiate  others  also  into 
the  perfect  worship  and  into  the  secret  depths  of  wisdom. 
The  phrases  used  by  the  Apostle  are  directed  against  this 
from  the  very  beginning  :  cf.  i.  6,  sTrsyvcors  EV 
ver.  9,  ETTLyvwaiv  EV  Trdcrr)  aofyLq  /cal  (Tvvscrei 
ver.  10,  rrj  sTriyvcoasi,  rov  6sov,  ver.  27,  yv&ptaut  rl  TO 


rov  nfofiov,  ii.  8  and  20.  •  ii.  16. 

3  ii.  23  and  21.  4  ii.  8  and  22. 

5  ii.  8  and  18  ('  puffed  up  by  his  fleshly  mind  ').  6  ii.  23. 

7  i.  25  fol.,  ii.  I.  8  i.  23  and  25. 


134      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  I. 


ver.  28,  sv  Trdcrrj  dO(f)la  i'va  Trapao-Tija-to/jisv  Trdvra 
TE  \siov,1  and  it  is  surely  in  reference  to  the 
claims  of  his  opponents  that  Paul  speaks  so  often  here  of 
'  filling  '  and  '  fulness  '  ;  perhaps,  indeed,  he  was  borrowing 
their  very  terms.  We  should  probably  do  the  practical 
philosophy  of  which  they  made  such  show  too  much  honour 
by  ascribing  it  to  a  dualistic  scheme  of  things.  It  must  have 
been  a  mixture  between  certain  fantastic  speculations,  on  the 
one  hand,  concerning  the  spirit  world—  for  the  transition  is 
easy  between  the  mystic  and  the  spiritualist—  i.e.  concerning 
the  intermediate  beings  who  lay  between  the  invisible  Godhead 
and  lowly  man,  and  whose  favour  must  be  secured  or  whose 
tyranny  avoided  ;  and,  on  the  other,  a  host  of  precepts  for 
reaching  the  goal  through  the  practice  of  cults  and  through 
ascetic  observances.  Considerable  relics  of  heathen,  Hellenic 
and  Oriental  customs  would  here  appear,  though  clothed  in 
Christian  forms  ;  the  old  gods,  whether  good  or  evil,  would 
be  called  Angels,  and  the  ceremonial  indispensable  to  the 
mind  once  nurtured  amid  the  mysteries  of  the  East  fitted  as 
closely  as  possible  to  that  prescribed  in  the  holy  Scriptures  of 
Israel,  which  the  Gospel  also  acknowledged,  but  of  course 
with  a  certain  wilfulness  (sOeXoOpijo-Kia)  in  points  of  detail. 
The  ascetic  temperament  also  had  its  part,  as  with  all  the 
religious  movements  of  that  age.  Whence  the  elements  of 
their  wisdom  of  mysteries  really  came,  the  false  brethren 
themselves  did  not  know,  nor  did  they  observe,  any  more 
than  was  observed  by  the  later  worshippers  of  the  Virgin 
Mary  and  of  the  Saints,  that  it  resulted  in  the  expulsion  of 
Christ  from  his  unique  position  ;  they  imagined  that  they 
had  discovered  perfect  knowledge  through  the  study  of  the 
Scriptures  and  the  Gospel  itself.  Here,  then,  we  have,  in 
its  main  features,  a  tolerably  clear  picture  of  these  heretics. 

6.  With  this  interpretation,  moreover,  the  chief  objection 
against  the  tradition,  which  never  omits  Colossians  from 
among  the  Pauline  Epistles,  is  removed.  Baur  imagines 
that  he  recognised  in  the  misleaders  of  Colossse  the  Gnostics 
who  in  the  second  century  jeopardised  the  existence  of  the 
Church,  and  that  the  Epistle  was  composed  in  order  to  deal 

1  Cf.  iii.  14. 


>!  li.]       EPISTLES   TO   THE    COLOSSIANS   AND    EPHESIANS      135 

a  death-blow  at  Gnosticism  in  the  name  of  the  great  Apostle. 
Others,  again,  have  considered  that  in  the  polemical  parts  of 
the  Epistle  there  were  two  layers  lying  one  above  the  other, 
one  of  which  was  Pauline  and  contended  against  false  pro- 
phets of  the  type  of  the  '  weak  brethren  '  of  Rome— except 
that  here  they  laid  down  as  rules  what  at  Rome  they  merely 
practised  on  their  own  account — while  the  other  was  later  by 
many  decades  and  dealt  with  Gnosticism  as  the  arch-enemy. 
Here  the  picture  of  the  heretics  was  painted  over  in  such  a 
way  as  to  cause  the  Gnostic  of  the  second  century  to  be 
recognised  in  it.  But  all  the  traits  that  are  in  any  way 
distinctive  in  the  Epistle  can  easily  be  understood  as  united 
in  a  single  class  of  *  teachers/  and  these  teachers  again  might 
very  well  have  arisen  in  Paul's  time.  There  is  nothing  that 
points  to  any  of  the  greater  Gnostic  systems,  which  we  can 
date  with  tolerable  certainty — in  fact  the  '  Gnosticism  '  that 
is  attacked  in  Colossians  is  actually  older  than  Christianity. 
It  is  true  that  we  have  no  other  evidence  of  such  philosophers 
in  South-Western  Phrygia  about  the  year  63,  but,  considering 
the  state  of  our  knowledge  concerning  that  time  and  district, 
we  have  no  right  to  expect  such  evidence,  especially  when  it  is 
a  question,  as  here,  of  transitory  phenomena.  Moreover,  if  a 
Christian  of  the  third  or  fourth  generation  A.D.  were  here 
attacking  the  Gnosticism  of  his  time,  we  should  justly  be 
surprised  at  his  silence  upon  the  worst  charges  which  from 
his  point  of  view  could  be  brought  against  it,  and  at  his 
working  instead  with  such  feeble  weapons. 

If,  on  the  other  hand,  Paul  had  to  deal  with  men  of  the 
type  described  above,  the  course  he  adopted  here  was  exceed- 
ingly natural.  He  does  not  attempt  to  go  into  details,  because 
he  was  not  accurately  enough  informed ;  he  is  content  to 
emphasise  the  fact  that,  after  what  he  had  heard,  he  must 
affirm  that  they  had  fallen  back  into  the  bondage  of 
outward  ordinances  and  into  a  misconception  of  the  dignity 
of  Christ.  But  he  has  no  cause  to  enter  upon  an  angry 
invective  against  the  supposed  idolatry  of  the  Colossians, 
still  less  to  point  out  that  these  Jewish  philosophers  enter- 
tained, side  by  side,  contradictory  and  irreconcilable  theories  : 
the  latter  was  unnecessary,  because  he  had  no  intention  of 


136       AX    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

delivering  a  lecture  on  logic,  and  the  former  because  these 
false  teachers,  with  their  worship  of  angels,  did  not  call  the 
monotheistic  idea  in  question  any  more  than  Paul  himself, 
with  his  worship  of  the  Lord  Jesus.  Not  God,  but  Christ  in 
his  position  of  the  highest l  was  here  threatened,  and  it  was 
Paul's  object  to  insist  upon  the  unique  position  of  his  Master. 
The  formulae  in  which  he  here  expresses  the  incomparable 
superiority  of  Christ  over  all  the  powers  of  this  world, 
culminating  in  the  words  *  in  him  dwelleth  all  the  fulness 
of  the  Godhead  bodily,' 2  are  not,  it  is  true,  to  be  found 
in  the  earlier  Epistles,  and  in  i.  15-20  one  might  even 
recognise  a  change  from  the  old  Pauline  Christology  in  a 
cosmological  direction,3  new  points  of  view  and  new  interests 
being  brought  into  the  foreground.  But  if  it  was  only  by  this 
means  that  he  could  put  down  grievous  errors,  he  might  well 
have  accomplished  such  a  change  within  himself ;  and  the 
new  formulae  were  forced  upon  him  by  his  new  opponents. 
The  idea,  too,  of  the  Church,  i.e.  the  whole  body  of  the 
Saints,  as  the  Body  of  Christ 4 — which  is  to  be  met  with  both 
in  1.  Corinthians 5  and  in  Komans G — satisfies  the  needs  of  this 
controversy  ;  it  meant  that  all  Christians  without  distinction 
should  depend  upon  Christ,  without  any  other  mediators, 
advocates  or  contrivances  for  bringing  them  to  salvation. 
There  indeed  was  an  occasion  for  the  picture  of  the  Head  and 
the  Body,  which  also  illustrated  so  admirably  the  duty  of 
holding  fast  to  the  Head.  Nor  is  this  conception  of  the 
Church  by  any  means  post-Pauline,  for  as  early  as  1.  Corin- 
thians 7  Paul  divides  mankind  into  Jews,  Gentiles  and  the 
Church  of  God.  Colossians  certainly  does  not  aim  at  the  glori- 
fication of  the  Church  as  the  sole  means  to  salvation,  extra 
quam  nulla  salus,  in  the  sense  of  a  later  time,  but  only  at 
the  preservation  of  all  the  rights  of  its  Head  :  '  Christ  alone,' 
*  all  of  us  one  in  Christ,'  have  now,  in  consequence  of  the 
change  of  foe,  become  the  watchwords  in  place  of  the  anti- 
Judaistic  *  sola  fide'  The  mention  of  the  sufferings  endured 

1  i.  18  :    lv  TTCHTIV  a\irl)s  irpwrevuv  ;  cf.  i.  15  :   irpuroroKos  irdtTrjs  Krifff 

2  ii.  0.  especially  i.  16,  10,  20,  ii.  10. 

4  i   18,  24  ;  ii.  19.  :>  xii.  27  fol. 

•  xii.  r>.  ••  x.  32. 


§  11.]       EPISTLES    TO   THE    COLOSSIANS   AND    EPIIESIANS      137 

by  the  Apostle  for  the  Church,  the  '  body  of  Christ  '- 
sufferings  by  which  he  '  filled  up  on  his  part  that  which  was 
lacking  of  the  afflictions  of  Christ '  ' — would  be  intolerable 
in  the  mouth  of  a  later  writer,  but  Paul's  Christian  mystic- 
ism thereby  attains  its  most  characteristic  expression.  This 
participation,  he  means  to  say,  exalted  him  so  highly  in 
all  his  sufferings  that  through  them  he  approached  nearer 
and  nearer  to  Christ,  and,  as  he  says  in  Philippians,2  *  became 
conformed  unto  his  death.' 

None  but  the  Tubingen  school  have  discovered  a  concilia- 
tory tendency  in  an  epistle  so  devoid  of  the  slightest  conces- 
sions to  the  Jewish  Christians,  and  accordingly  the  only  re- 
maining argument  worth  mentioning  against  its  authenticity  is 
that  of  the  difference  of  style.  In  syntax  and  vocabulary  the 
Epistle  to  the  Colossians  has  many  peculiarities,  particularly 
in  the  way  of  long  strings  of  clauses  and  interminable  periods, 
which  look  very  much  like  patchwork,  while,  on  the  other 
hand,  much  of  Paul's  most  habitual  phraseology  is  absent.  But 
the  amount  of  agreement  is,  after  all,  much  larger,  and  the 
long-winded  style  only  occurs  in  passages  directed  against  the 
false  doctrine ;  nor  must  it  be  forgotten  that  Paul  was  not  so 
thoroughly  accustomed  to  these  views  as  he  was  to  those 
described  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Komans,  and  that  excitement 
did  not  here  lend  him  wings,  as  in  the  case  of  Galatians 
or  2.  Corinthians.  Moreover,  the  parallel  argument  in  Philip- 
pians  ii.  5-11  bears  a  stamp  somewhat  similar  to  that  of  the 
obnoxious  parts  of  Colossians,  and  who  could  expect  that 
Paul  in  his  imprisonment  and  old  age  would  overcome  such 
difficult  and  complex  dogmatic  problems  with  the  triumphant 
freshness  and  precision  that  he  had  displayed  when  in  the 
zenith  of  his  powers  ? 

Against  the  hypothesis  which  Holtzmann  has  so  in- 
geniously put  forward,  that  the  present  Epistle  to  the  Colos- 
sians represents  a  composite  product — a  genuine  Pauline 
foundation  with  later  interpolations  from  the  hand  of  the 
author  of  Ephesians — we  have  the  fact  that  the  suspicion  of 
such  interpolation  into  this  Epistle,  which  runs  on  in  an  even 
flow  without  obstacle  or  gap,  would  never  have  arisen  but  for 

1  i.  24.  -  iii.  10. 


138      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

the  presence  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians  beside  it.  Colos- 
sians  in  itself  fulfils  all  the  conditions  which  can  reasonably 
be  expected  of  an  Epistle  written  by  Paul  to  Colossae — entirely 
without  collaboration — in  the  circumstances  represented  above. 

7.  The  purpose  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians  is,  in  con- 
tradistinction to  all  the  Pauline  Epistles  we  have  yet  examined, 
little  dependent  upon  the  particular  circumstances  and  needs 
of  its  readers  ;  the  writer's  object  is  to  impress  upon  them  as 
decisively  as  possible  the  idea   of  the  divinity  and  unity  of 
the  Church  of  Christ,  a  unity  which  did  away  with  all  dis- 
tinctions between  Jewish  and  Gentile  Christians  and  all  hesi- 
tation and  error  in  doctrine  ;  and,  further,  to  unfold  the  con- 
sequences which  ensued   therefrom  for  the  conduct   of   the 
members  of  this  Church.    Provided  we  are  justified  in  defend- 
ing its  Pauline  authorship  at  all,  we  might  apply  the  name  of 
'  the  last  testament  of  the  dying  Paul '  to  this  Epistle  L  far 
rather  than  to  Philippians,  for  although  it  hardly  touches  upon 
certain  important  sides  of  Paul's  gospel— assuming  them  to  be 
well  known  beforehand — it  nevertheless  gives  a  rich  and  wide 
development  to  some  of  its  most  fundamental  ideas. 

The  very  widespread  and  searching  doubts  entertained 
in  this  case  even  by  scholars  who  are  otherwise  friendly 
to  tradition  relate  principally  to  two  questions  :  (1)  whether 
Ephesians  is  to  be  considered  as  an  epistle  addressed  by  Paul 
to  Ephesus,  and  (2)  whether  or  not  it  is  to  be  considered  as  a 
Pauline  Epistle  at  all. 

8.  The  answer  to  the  first  question  should  undoubtedly  be 
in  the  negative.     Paul  could  not  have  written  to  his  Ephesian 
community,  to  which  he  had  devoted  several  years  of  his 
best  powers,  and  with  which,  according  to  Acts  xx.  17-38 — not 
to  mention  Eomans  xvi.  and  the  hypothesis  of  the  Ephesian 
Epistle — he  had  maintained  such  close  relations  ever  since,  in 
the  calm  tone  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians.     He  sends  no 
special  greetings  either  to  or  from  anyone,  and  he  writes  only 
in  his  own  name,  even  though  Timothy,  who  was  well  known 
at  Ephesus,  was  with  him  now,  as  he  was  when  the  Epistle  to 
the  Colossians  was  written.     Writer  and  readers  are  here  per- 
sonally unknown  to  one  another.2   Yet  our  Epistle,  written  from 

1  In  spite  of  vi.  19.  2  iii.  2-4  and  i.  15. 


$  11.]       EPISTLES   TO    T1LK    COLOSSIANS   AND    KI'HKSIANS       139 

prison  as  it  was,  could  not  have  been  composed  before  Paul's 
long  sojourn  at  Ephesus,  simply  because  of  its  close  connec- 
tion with  Colossians  and  Philemon  ;  so  that  Paul,  who  since 
about  the  year  54  had  known  more  definitely  than  by 
hearsay  of  the  faith  and  love  of  the  Ephesians,  could  not 
have  written  it  to  them  at  all.  Moreover,  the  crucial  sv 
'  Fj(pso-(t)  of  the  address  is  textually  untrustworthy.  It  is  true 
that  the  Eoman  Canon  of  Muratori  (circa  200  A.D.)  knows  of 
the  Epistle  as  one  directed  to  Ephesus,  while  an  uninter- 
rupted line  of  further  witnesses  to  this  tradition  might  be 
enumerated  down  to  the  present  day ;  but  the  earliest 
Christian  to  whom  we  can  refer  for  the  superscriptions  of 
Pauline  Epistles,  Marcion,  sets  down  the  Epistle  as  one  '  to  the 
Laodiceans,'  and  cannot  therefore  have  read  '  in  Ephesus '  in 
verse  1.  From  the  way  in  which  Tertullian  proceeds  against 
Marcion  on  this  occasion  we  must  conclude  that  he  considered 
this  superscription  as  an  invention  of  his  adversary's,  but 
not  as  one  involving  the  erasure  of  anything  in  the  original 
text ;  in  fact,  Tertullian  does  not  seem  to  have  read  any 
indications  of  place  in  verse  1  at  all.  And  that  manuscripts 
merely  with  the  words  rols  ayiois  rols  overt  teal  TTIO-TOLS  were 
handed  down  as  late  as  the  fourth  century,  we  have  abundant 
evidence,  amongst  others,  in  Origen,  Basil  and  Jerome. 

Now,  that  anyone  should  intentionally  have  struck  out  an 
original  EV  E</>£o-w  is  presumably  not  to  be  thought  of — for  it 
would  have  been  replaced  by  something  else  and  not  simply 
erased — and  the  idea  that  there  was  originally  no  indication  of 
place  at  all  is  even  more  fantastic,  for  the  addresses  of  2.  Corin- 
thians, Romans  J  and  Philippians  effectually  prove  that  this 
was  indispensable.  We  must  assume,  then,  that  the  original 
mention  of  the  addressees  has  accidentally  disappeared,  and 
that  the  words  h  'E</>£o-ft>  are  the  conjecture — although  cer- 
tainly an  ancient  one — of  a  copyist  who  wished  to  fill  up  the 
intolerable  gap  after  rols  ovaiv  and  who  had  received  the 
superscription  '  to  the  Ephesians '  from  tradition,  which 
even  Zahn  here  accuses  of  being  in  error.  All  sorts  of 
explanations  have  been  put  forward  of  the  origin  of  this 
mistake,  but  to  me  the  simplest  appears  to  be  that  the 

1  Rom.  i.  7. 


140      AN   INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

collector  into  whose  hands  the  Epistle  had  fallen,  unaddressed, 
could  not  endure  the  absence  of  superscription  and  put  in  a 
conjectural  Trpos  'Efao-ious  from  the  idea  that  the  community 
of  Ephesus,  where  Paul  had  laboured  for  three  years,  must 
surely  have  received  a  letter  from  its  Apostle  at  one  time  or 
another. 

Unfortunately,  we  are  not  in  a  position  to  replace  this  sin- 
gularly mistaken  conjecture  by  a  better  one.  The  '  Laodicea  ' 
of  Marcion  is  possibly  but  another  conjecture,  though  that 
of  the  most  attentive  reader  of  the  Pauline  Epistles.  The 
fact  that  an  epistle  of  Paul  to  Laodicea  was  mentioned  in 
Colossians,  but  had  already  disappeared,  would  make  it  natural 
that  the  unaddressed  document  should  be  considered  as  the 
epistle  there  mentioned,  especially  as  there  was  no  desire  to 
acknowledge  the  definite  loss  of  any  Apostolic  Epistle.  The 
conjecture  is  not  a  bad  one,  for  the  Laodicean  epistle  cannot 
have  been  written  much  before  Colossians,  so  that  the  great 
similarity  between  the  two  would  thereby  be  conveniently 
explained.  The  Laodiceans  were  personally  unacquainted 
with  Paul,1  as  ver.  i.  15  of  Ephesians  would  require,  and 
Tychicus  was  probably  the  bearer  of  the  epistle  to  Laodicea 
as  well  as  of  that  to  Colossae,  which  fits  in  admirably  with 
Eph.  vi.  21  fol.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  one  cannot  imagine 
any  motive  which  could  have  induced  Paul  to  treat  the 
Laodiceans,  with  whom  in  reality  he  stood  on  the  same 
footing  as  with  the  Colossians,  in  such  a  totally  different  way, 
to  avoid  all  individualising  with  them,  and  to  show  himself 
so  distant  with  them  while  so  friendly  with  the  latter.  In 
my  opinion  it  is  inconceivable  that  the  Apostle  should  have 
taken  up  this  tone  towards  any  single  community,  but  as  we 
are  nevertheless  concerned  with  an  epistle  in  which  the 
writer  draws  a  sharp  distinction  between  himself  and  his 
readers — these  latter  merely  forming  a  very  large  body,  upon 
whom  he  impresses  what  all  stood  in  equal  need  of — the 
assumption  that  Paul  is  here  addressing  the  whole  Gentile- 
Christian  world  is  misleading.  In  that  case  the  words  in 
question  would  originally  have  run  'rots'  ovaiv  h>  Wvtarw* 
But,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  we  learn  nothing  about  the  addressees 

'  Col.  ii.  1. 


5  11.]      EPISTLES   TO   THE    COLOSSIANS   AND   EPHESIANS       141 

from  the  Epistle  except  that  they  were  now  believers,1  and 
had  once  been  heathens.2  Another  objection  to  this  hypo- 
thesis is  that  the  remark  about  Tychicus  in  vi.  21  pre- 
supposes a  more  contracted  circle  of  readers,  for  he  had 
naturally  not  been  charged  to  go  round  among  all  the  Gentile- 
Christian  communities.  Moreover,  in  several  passages  :i  the 
readers  are  distinguished  from  *  all  the  saints,'  and  ver.  iii. 
18  alone  would  prevent  us  from  looking  upon  these  latter  as 
referring  only  to  the  Jewish  Christians,  or  even,  as  some 
contend,  to  the  community  of  Jerusalem. 

If,  therefore,  we  are  dealing  with  a  genuine  epistle  and 
not  with  the  religious  opinions  of  a  later  Christian,  trying, 
clumsily  enough,  to  act  the  part  of  an  Apostle  of  the  Gentiles 
writing  to  one  of  his  communities,  there  is  but  one  supposi- 
tion left  to  us :  Ephesians  is  a  circular  epistle  addressed  to  a 
group  of  Gentile-Christian  communities  which  had  arisen 
without  Paul's  direct  co-operation,  which  were  on  the  whole 
in  possession  of  the  true  Gospel,  and  upon  which  he  was 
anxious  to  exercise  a  direct  influence  and  to  bestow  some 
spiritual  gift  as  soon  as  opportunity  arose.  The  mission  of 
Tychicus,  who  was  going  from  Eome  to  Colossae,  now  made  it 
possible  that  these  communities  should  be  sought  out ;  more 
than  this  it  is  not  worth  while  to  conjecture.  It  is  but  small 
satisfaction  to  declare  that  this  circular  epistle  is  identical 
with  that  '  from  Laodicea '  mentioned  in  Colossians  iv.  16, 
and  it  is  decidedly  bold  to  conclude  from  the  word  SK  (rrjv  SK 
KaoSiKias)  that  Paul  was  not  referring  there  to  an  epistle  to 
the  Laodiceans  but  merely  to  one  from  Laodicea — that  is,  to 
one  intended  for  Colossae  after  Laodicea,  but  not  destined  to 
rest  even  there.  Every  unprejudiced  reader  would  surely 
take  these  words  as  referring  to  the  exchange  of  two  equally 
valuable  possessions  by  communities  lying  side  by  side. 
Thus,  then,  Paul  must  have  written  three  epistles  contem- 
poraneously with  Philemon — Colossians,  Ephesians  and  the 
lost  epistle  to  the  Laodiceans — and  we  can  therefore  hardly 
wonder  at  finding  constant  repetitions  and  a  certain  tone  of 
fatigue  in  the  latest  in  date  of  the  three.  Of  course  Pau1 

1  i.  i:-J,  15  fol.  -  ii.  1,  11-13,  17  fol.,  iii.  1,  iv.  17. 

3  i.  15,  iii.  18,  vi.  18. 


142      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

would  not  have  left  the  addressees  unnamed  in  the  circular 
epistle ;  he  needed  only  to  choose  the  name  of  the  province 
(or  provinces),  or  else  some  other  geographical  term  embrac- 
ing the  desired  area  ;  but  the  suggestion  that  Paul  had  had  a 
number  of  copies  of  the  epistle  prepared,  each  with  a  blank 
after  TO^  ovcriv,  so  that  Tychicus  should  there  insert  the 
name  of  each  new  community  that  he  visited — and  in  this 
way  the  words  sv  'E</>sV<w  would  have  originated  from  the 
hand  of  Tychicus  ! — is  an  idea,  after  all,  that  savours  too 
much  of  the  modern  practical  spirit.  According  to  our 
hypothesis,  Ephesians  would  be  definitely  placed  on  the 
dividing-line  between  the  Epistles  proper  and  the  Catholic 
Epistles,  in  which  the  epistolary  element  is  reduced  to  a 
literary  form,  and  curiously  enough  there  are  not  a  few 
material  points  of  contact,  too,  between  our  Epistle  and  these 
latter. 

9.  But  the  importance  of  the  question  above  discussed 
shrinks  to  the  vanishing  point  if  Ephesians  was  merely  foisted 
upon  Paul,  and  if  its  addressees  have  as  little  reality  as  its 
nominal  author.  It  is  true  that  the  external  evidence  is 
favourable  to  the  Epistle  ;  it  was  much  used  by  the  Christian 
literature  of  the  second  century,  very  probably  as  early  as 
the  First  Epistle  of  Peter  ;  indeed,  it  has  actually  been  pro- 
posed to  ascribe  both  these  Epistles  to  the  same  writer. 
This  alone  is  enough  to  prevent  our  assigning  it  to  a 
date  later  than  100  A.D.,  so  that  the  hypotheses  of  the 
Tubingen  school  as  to  its  anti-Gnostic  or  anti-Montanist 
tendencies  are  negatived  by  the  date  of  its  composition.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  supposed  literary  obligations  of  this 
Epistle  to  the  four  Principal  Epistles  or  to  any  written  Gospels 
are  nowhere  so  much  as  rendered  probable.  But  there  is  no 
lack  of  very  serious  considerations.  The  Epistle  possesses  a 
quite  unusual  amount  of  words  peculiar  to  itself ;  for  instance 
the  devil,  regularly  spoken  of  by  Paul  under  the  name  of 
Satan— though  once  called  the  *  Tempter  '  and  once  Beliar— 
is  here  '  8m/3oXos-,'  *  and  the  unwonted  stiffnesses  of  style 
in  Colossians  i.  and  ii.  are  here  substantially  exaggerated 
and  multiplied.  Cumbrous  chains  of  sentences,  full  of 

1  iv.  27,  vi.  11. 


§  11.]      EPISTLES   TO    THE    COLOSSIANS    AND    KIMIKS1ANS       143 

participles  and  relative  pronouns,  are  the  rule  ;  there  are 
numerous  lengthy  passages l  each  consisting  in  reality  of 
a  single  sentence — into  which  only  a  few  arbitrary  stops 
can  be  introduced.  Instances  of  the  coupling  of  two 
synonymous  nouns  by  means  of  a  genitive  or  a  preposition 
are  remarkably  numerous  2 ;  there  is  an  obvious  overcrowd- 
ing and  diffuseness  of  style  (e.g.  iii.  18 :  'to  apprehend  .  .  . 
what  is  the  breadth  and  length  and  height '  &c.)  and  the 
thoughts  are  often  obscured,  as  though  stifled,  by  the  rush  of 
words.  On  the  other  hand,  much  that  is  specifically  Pauline 
may  be  found  in  Ephesians,  such  as  the  metaphorical  use  of 
ol/coSo/jir),*  Trs-ptaasvsiv  used  transitively,4  the  words  /caravrav, 
dppafiayv,  dTro\vTpa)(TL$,  dva/cstyaXaiovcrOai,  and  so  on,  and  in 
both  parts  of  the  Epistle  we  are  continually  being  reminded  of 
Pauline  ideas  and  modes  of  expression.  At  any  rate,  since 
style  is  greatly  influenced  by  the  mood  of  the  writer  (see 
pp.  137,  141),  we  could  not,  if  the  pros  and  cons  were 
otherwise  evenly  balanced,  let  this  argument  turn  the  scale. 

We  may,  however,  perceive  here  no  less  than  in  Colossians 
a  development  of  the  Pauline  doctrine  in  the  direction  of 
Johannine  theology.  The  lively  interest  in  the  universal 
Church  which  dominates  the  Epistle  is  certainly  a  new 
feature ;  but  here  again  it  is  a  question  of  a  development  of 
existing  germs,  a  thing  that  could  not  have  been  the  mere  work 
of  a  later  writer.  The  lack  of  definite  features  in  its  teaching 
is  unquestionable ;  in  fact,  Ephesians  almost  gives  one 
the  impression  of  a  printed  sermon  ;  but  then  we  possess 
no  other  circular  epistle  from  Paul's  hand  to  use  as  a 
standard  by  which  to  reject  this  one.  To  say  that  the 
falseness  of  the  situation  appears  in  the  statements  made  by 
the  Apostle  concerning  himself  or  his  readers  is  surely  an 
exaggeration,  and  the  hyperbole  of  iii.  8 — in  minimis  Deus 
maximus — has  by  no  means  an  un-Pauline  ring.  The  readers 
are  represented — quite  in  accordance  with  the  circumstances 
of  the  case — as  having  formerly  been  Gentiles,  and  as  still 

1  i.  3-14,  i.  15-23,  ii.  1-10,  i  i.  I-1 9. 

2  E.g.    ii.   14,  rb  (Jit<T/>Toixov  T°v   4>pa7M°*> ;     ii.   15,  6  v6fj.os  ru>v    €vro\u>v    eV 
5  >7fj.a<riv  ;  iv.  13,  fis  /JLerpov  7j\iKias  TOV  ir\-npufJ.aros  TOV  Xpiarov. 

3  ii.  21,  iv.  12,  16  and  29.  4  i.  8. 


144      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

standing  much  in  need  of  greater  perfection  in  knowledge 
and  morality,  but  there  is  no  indication  that  the  writer  is 
addressing  a  second  generation,  which  would  of  course  have 
contained  a  certain  number  of  Christians  by  birth.  The  few 
sentences  that  are  tinged  with  controversy  ]  would  suit  the 
mood — and  the  date  as  well — of  the  Epistle  to  the  Colossians. 
The  struggle  against  Judaism  seems  indeed  to  be  laid  aside, 
but  why  should  Paul  have  carried  it  on  in  a  place  where  the 
danger  that  threatened  was  from  heathenism  alone?  Of 
course  the  whole  tone  of  the  Epistle  would  be  quite 
comprehensible  on  the  supposition  that  a  Pauline  Christian 
of  about  the  year  90  was  its  author,  but  with  a  general 
work  like  this  the  only  question  is  whether  it  would  be  in- 
comprehensible  as  coming  whence  it  professes  to  come,  i.e. 
from  Paul,  and  whether  it  becomes  more  comprehensible  as 
to  purpose,  form  and  ideas  if  we  assume  that  it  was  the  work 
of  a  later  '  forger.' 

The  greatest  difficulties  are  presented  by  individual  pas- 
sages ;  not  indeed  by  iv.  5,  for  the  words  '  one  faith,  one 
baptism '  become  perfectly  natural  when  considered  in  their 
context,  and  TTIO-TLS  does  not  mean  a  profession  of  faith,  but 
faith  itself,  the  sole  condition  of  salvation,  as  baptism  is  the 
assurance  of  it.  But  vv.  iv.  11,  ii.  20  and  iii.  5  do  present  such 
difficulties.  In  the  first  of  these  the  Church  offices  established 
by  God  are  enumerated — '  Apostles,  prophets,  evangelists, 
pastors  and  teachers' — and  here  the  absence  of  the  ecstatic 
'  spiritual  gifts,'  which  Paul  had  rated  so  highly  in  1.  Corin- 
thians xii.-xiv.,  is  considered  to  be  a  sign  of  later  authorship. 

But,  in  the  first  place,  the  '  prophets '  undoubtedly  belong 
to  this  missing  class,  and,  in  the  second,  the  list  is  not  intended 
to  be  a  complete  one ;  moreover  in  this  setting,  where  Paul's 
thoughts  are  turned  towards  the  building  up  of  the  Church 
in  unity  of  spirit,  his  choice  is  by  no  means  ill  directed. 
Evangelists  are  certainly  not  mentioned  by  Paul  in  any  other 
Epistle.  Yet  how  else  was  he  to  describe  the  men  who  had 
first  proclaimed  the  Gospel  in  these  Asiatic  communities,  but 
had  claimed  the  title  neither  of  Apostles  nor  of  Prophets  ? 
Gratitude,  if  nothing  else,  obliged  him  to  mention  them,  and 

1  iv.  14  fol.,  v.  6. 


§  11.]     EPISTLES   TO   THE    COLOSSIANS   AND    EPHESIANS       145 

the  term  '  teacher '  was  not  comprehensive  enough.  Again,  the 
words  of  ii.  20,  that  the  Church  '  is  built  upon  the  foundation 
of  the  apostles  and  prophets,  Christ  Jesus  himself  being  the 
chief  corner-stone,'  would  certainly,  ceteris  paribus,  seem  to 
point  to  an  Apostle's  disciple  rather  than  to  an  Apostle  as  the 
author,  while  it  sounds  stranger  still  from  the  lips  of  Paul 
that  the  mystery  of  Christ  was  now  revealed  *  unto  his  holy 
apostles  and  prophets  in  the  Spirit'  (iii.  5).  Nevertheless,  as 
early  as  1.  Corinthians  l  the  Apostles  are  already  treated  in 
some  sort  as  a  self-consistent  order,  and  if  in  carrying  out 
the  simile  of  the  building-up  of  the  Church  the  position  of 
corner-stone  was  reserved  for  Christ,  it  was  natural  that  the 
Apostles  should  be  assigned  the  part  of  foundation  which  in 
1.  Corinthians2  had  been  assigned  to  Christ.  The  self-confi- 
dence shown  in  1.  Corinthians  iii.  10  is  also  scarcely  less  than 
that  expressed  in  Ephesians  ii.  20.  And  in  defence  of  iii.  5 
it  may  be  pointed  out  that  the  title  of  *  holy  '  means  more  to 
our  perceptions  than  it  would  have  to  Paul's,  for  he  calls 
every  believer  a  '  saint.'  Nevertheless,  it  cannot  be  denied 
that  it  is  one  thing  to  count  oneself  as  belonging  to  the  com- 
munity of  saints,  and  quite  another  to  speak  of  the  '  holy 
Apostles  '  as  including  oneself  in  their  number,  and  I  am 
unable  to  attribute  such  a  breach  of  taste  to  Paul.  But  might 
not  the  word  djLois  have  been  an  interpolation  prompted  by 
primitive  piety  ? 

But,  whatever  be  the  decision  at  which  we  arrive,  the 
relationship  between  Ephesians  and  Colossians  must  always 
remain  remarkable.  The  points  of  resemblance  both  in 
expression  and  matter  are  so  numerous  as  to  exclude  all  idea 
of  coincidence.  Except  for  a  few  verses  in  chap,  i.,  the 
passages  in  which  Colossians  stands  alone,  without  parallels 
in  Ephesians,  are  only  four,3  while,  on  the  other  hand, 
Ephesians  contains  but  seven4  which  are  independent  of 
Colossians.  Even  in  these,  frequent  points  of  agreement 
with  Colossians  may  be  found.  This  is  all  the  more  re- 

1  xv.  9-11.  2  iii.  11. 

3  ii.   1-9   and   16-23  (though  with  vv.  7   and   19   excepted),   iii.   1-4,  iv. 
9-18. 

4  i.  3-14,  iii.  13-21,  iv.  1-16,  17  fol.,  20  fol.,  v.  23-32,  vi.  10-17. 

L 


146       AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

markable  because  the  anti-heretical  purpose  of  Colossians  is 
by  no  means  that  of  the  author  of  Ephesians  ;  nor  can  there 
be  any  question  of  a  simple  absorption  into  the  one  Epistle 
of  integral  parts  of  the  other,  for  the  parallels  to  Col.  i.  3-27, 
for  instance,  are  scattered  through  the  first  four  chapters  of 
Ephesians  in  an  entirely  different  order.  What  is  true  of 
Colossians,  indeed,  may  also  be  affirmed  of  Ephesians,  viz. 
that  no  one  who  did  not  have  Colossians  before  him  would 
imagine  the  Epistle  to  have  been  composed  by  patchwork 
and  the  interpolation  of  extraneous  pieces.  Professor  Holtz- 
mann,  however,  after  the  most  searching  examination  of  the 
materials,  has  conceived  the  idea  that  the  indebtedness  belongs 
partly  to  Ephesians  and  partly  to  Colossians ;  but  if  we 
reject  as  too  complicated  the  hypothesis  he  has  built  up 
upon  it,  by  which  Ephesians  would  come  to  lie  between 
a  genuine  epistle  of  Paul  to  Colossae  and  our  present  Epistle 
to  the  Colossians  (which  he  considers  as  the  product  of  a 
later  re-casting  in  which  Ephesians  was  drawn  upon),  the 
simplest  explanation  would  still  be  that  one  man — in  this 
case  Paul — had  written  the  two  related  Epistles,  at  short 
intervals,  but  Ephesians  probably  a  little  later,  and  that 
certain  thoughts  and  modes  of  expression  which  were  still  in 
his  mind  from  the  earlier  Epistle  had  found  their  way  plenti- 
fully into  the  later.  For  it  would  only  be  true  to  say  that 
the  author  must  have  had  the  earlier  work  before  him  when 
he  wrote  the  later,  if  we  assume  that  Ephesians  was  the 
work  of  a  later  writer,  but  even  on  comparing  Eph.  vi.  21  fol. 
with  Col.  iv.  7  fol.  it  would  not  be  true  of  Paul,  precisely 
because  the  reproduction  of  the  one  in  the  other  is  not 
literal  enough.  The  curious  mixture  in  it  of  original 
thought-exposition  with  dependence  on  the  parallel  Epistle — 
which  must  always  be  admitted — can  best  be  explained  by 
supposing  that  in  both  Epistles  the  same  writer  was  pouring 
forth  his  soul,  and  that  since  his  circles  of  readers  were  not 
contiguous  he  did  not  too  anxiously  avoid  repetition. 

Nor  has  a  clear  hypothesis  of  the  circumstances  under 
which  a  Paulus  redivivus  might  have  composed  the  Epistle 
to  the  Ephesians  ever  been  provided,  for  it  is  impossible  to 
see  what  purpose  he  could  have  served  or  why  he  made  such 


§  11.]     EPISTLES   TO    THE    COLOSSIANS   AND    EPHES1ANS        147 

a  particularly  thorough  use  of  Colossians,  when  he  himself  (^ 
did  not  lack  independent  ideas  and  was  also  acquainted  with 
other  Pauline  Epistles.  Many  separate  points  in  the  Epistle 
would  certainly  become  more  intelligible  on  the  assumption 
that  it  was  written  by  an  Apostle's  disciple— though  even 
then  he  must  have  come  into  extraordinarily  close  contact 
with  his  master — but  not  so  the  Epistle  as  a  whole.  Although, 
then,  Ephesians  may  not  belong  to  our  unquestioned  Pauline 
heritage,  it  would  yet  be  equally  impossible  to  deny  the 
Apostle's  authorship  with  any  confidence. 


i.  2 


148       AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  u. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE    DEUTERO-PAULINE   EPISTLES 

§  12.  The  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews 

[Cf.  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  vol.  xiii.,  by  B.  Weiss  (1897),  and  vol.  iii. 
Bk.  2  of  the  '  Hand-Commentar,'  comprising  Hebrews,  1.  and 
2.  Peter,  James  and  Jude,  byH.  von  Soden  (1899).  For  special  com- 
mentaries, consult  F.  Bleek  (1828,  1836  and  1840),  whose  3  vol. 
work  lays  the  foundation  of  the  subject  and  contains  a  great  deal 
of  scholarly  material ;  F.  Delitzsch  (1857),  whose  book  contains 
much  original  work ;  pp.  1-70  of  F.  Overbeck's  '  Zur  Geschichte 
des  Canons  '  (1880),  in  which  he  traces  the  history  of  the  Epistle  as 
far  as  400  A.D.,  and  of  which  pp.  3-18,  on  the  probable  history  of  the 
period  preceding  it,  are  especially  valuable  ;  H.  von  Soden's  articles 
in  the  '  Jahrbuch  fur  protestantische  Theologie '  (1884),  Heft  3  and 
4,  in  which  he  concludes  that  the  readers  were  not  Jewish  Chris- 
tians but  the  Christian  communities  of  Italy ;  E.  Me'negoz,  '  La 
th6ologie  de  l'£pitre  aux  Hebreux,'  in  which  pp.  9-76  deal  with 
questions  of  Introduction  (the  addressees  Jewish  Christians  of  a 
single  extra-Palestinian  community,  date  between  64  and  67),  and 
A.  Harnack,  in  the  '  Zeitschrift  fur  die  Neutestamentliche  Wissen- 
schaft/  i.  1900  (addressees  the  house-community  of  Aquila  and 
Prisca  in  Rome  [see  Romans  xvi.  3],  author  either  Prisca  or  Aquila, 
date  between  65  and  80).] 

1.  The  distinction  with  which  we  are  familiar  in 
Paul's  writings  between  a  theoretical  and  a  practical  part, 
cannot  be  said  to  exist  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews, 
even  though  a  considerable  division  occurs  at  ver.  x.  18, 
and  from  this  point  onwards  the  exhortative  character 
decidedly  prevails.  For  between  the  beginning  and  x.  18  we 
may  find  sections  both  large  and  small  which  do  not  differ 
in  any  way  from  the  tone  of  the  concluding  part,  while  on 


§  12.]  Till:    KPISTLE   TO   THE    HEBREWS  149 

the  other  hand  certain  passages  l  in  the  latter  hold  the  same 
language  as  the  main  parts  of  the  dogmatic  half — not  to 
mention  such  mixed  passages  as  vv.  xii.  18-29  or  vv. 
xiii.  13-16.  It  is  precisely  the  peculiarity  of  this  Epistle  that 
it  does  not  present  a  consistent  doctrinal  development  of 
ideas,  followed  by  a  conclusion  of  friendly  advice  for  the  life 
of  the  community  and  of  the  individual,  but  that  the  intel- 
lectual instruction  which  it  gives  is  used  each  time  as  the 
occasion  or  as  the  broad  foundation  for  practical  exhortation. 
This  follows  from  the  fact  that  the  ultimate  object  which  the 
author  was  pursuing  was  distinctly  practical ;  his  task  was  to 
rouse  his  readers  out  of  a  religious  condition  partly  timorous 
and  faint-hearted,  partly  dull,  slothful  and  thoughtless, 
partly  eager  for  change  and  almost  ripe  for  apostasy.  He 
must  restore  them  to  unswerving  fortitude,  to  patience  and 
courage,  earnestness  and  strength,  and  above  all  to  pride  in 
their  Christian  faith,  and,  moreover,  he  must  do  this  by 
means  of  a  knowledge  of  the  Scriptures  well  calculated 
to  demonstrate  the  full  majesty  of  that  Christian  faith.  A 
characteristic  feature  of  Hebrews  is  its  reliance  on  Christian 
knowledge  as  the  foundation  of  Christian  strength,  or,  con- 
versely, its  conviction  that  indifference  in  moral  and  religious 
matters  must  necessarily  imply  certain  defects  of  Christian 
insight  or  of  Christian  knowledge.  '  Jesus  Christ  is  the 
same  yesterday  and  to-day,  yea  and  for  ever ' 2 — there  lay 
the  substance  of  Christianity,  and  therefore  its  supreme 
value  would  be  proved  if  on  as  wide  a  comparison  as  possible 
of  Christ  with  the  other  known  claimants  of  divine  revela- 
tion, the  enormous  superiority  of  the  former — admitting 
neither  supplement  nor  enrichment — were  yielded  as  the 
result.  The  writer  himself  calls  his  Epistle  '  the  word  of 
exhortation  '  (o  \6yos  rrjs  Trapa/c^o-scos)*  and  although  he 
also  feels  himself  a  teacher,"1  the  task  he  sets  himself  is  not 
that  of  revealing  or  of  re-establishing  individual  truths,  but 
of  showing  the  necessity  of  truth ;  he  wishes  to  impart  the 
*  word  of  righteousness  ' : 5  and  that '  perfection  '  which  was  to 


1  x.  26-31,  xi.  1-40,  xiii.  10-12.  2  xiii.  8. 

3  xiii.  22,  and  cf.  x.  25&.  4  v.  12.  5  v.  13. 


150       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

be  his  own  and  his  readers'  goal  !  was  solely  dependent  in  his 
eyes  on  the  highest  training  of  the  power  *  to  discern  good 
and  evil.' 2  The  writer  never  loses  sight  of  this  fundamental 
idea ;  all  the  subtleties  of  his  Scriptural  proof  are  only 
intended  to  help  in  establishing  beyond  question  the  perfec- 
tion of  Christ  and  of  Christianity,  and  thereby  in  rendering 
inoperative  all  temptations  to  an  abandonment  of  Christ. 

The  Epistle  begins  at  once  with  denning  the  revelation 
of  God  in  His  Son  as  the  ultimate  and  most  effectual.3 
Hereupon  the  exaltation  of  the  Son  above  all  the  angels  is 
demonstrated  : 4  although  he  had  for  a  short  time  been 
'  made  lower  than  the  angels,'  had  '  partaken  of  flesh  and 
blood,'  had  been  delivered  up  to  death  and  exposed  to  temp- 
tation, this  had  only  come  to  pass  in  order  that  he  might  carry 
out  his  work  of  salvation  and  be  a  true  brother  to  mankind. 
In  the  next  chapter  r>  the  superiority  of  Jesus  over  Moses 
and  Joshua  is  likewise  established.  Moses  was  only  faithful 
as  a  *  servant  in  the  house,'  whereas  Christ  was  faithful  as 
a  '  son,  over  his  house,'  and  Joshua  had  not  been  able  to  lead 
his  people  to  true  rest,  for  the  fulfilment  of  that  promise  was 
to  be  the  work  of  Christ.  The  next  section  compares  Christ, 
the  true  Melchisedek,  with  the  spiritual  head  of  the  ancient 
Israelites,  the  High  Priest  Aaron6:  the  latter  and  his  suc- 
cessors, we  are  told,  were  appointed  without  an  oath  from 
God,  succeeded  one  another  at  short  intervals,  and  were 
obliged  to  offer  up  sacrifices  for  their  own  sins  as  well  as  for 
those  of  the  people  ;  whereas  the  High  Priest  Christ  received 
his  office  with  an  oath,  would  abide  in  it  unchangeable  for  ever 
and  was  free  from  sin.  But — and  this  was  the  main  point — 
it  was  not  his  Person  alone  which  was  so  highly  exalted  ;  his 
Work  also  towered  infinitely  high  above  that  of  the  High 
Priests  of  the  Old  Testament,7  for  he  performed  it  in  Heaven, 
and  they  but  in  the  lowly  tabernacle  ;  his  sacrifice  was  of 
his  own  blood,  theirs  but  of  the  blood  of  beasts:  he  had 
redeemed  our  sins  once  and  for  all,  while  the  Levitical  priest- 
hood must  continually  renew  their  imperfect  offerings. 

There  is  no  lack  of  practical  applications  in  each  of  these 

1  vi.  1.  -  v.  14.  •  i.  1-3.  4  i.  4-ii.  18. 

•  Hi.  1-iv.  13.  •  iv.  14-vii.  28.  '  viii.  1-x.  18. 


§  12.]  TIIU    EPISTLE    TO    TIIK    HEBREWS  151 

main  divisions  of  the  first  part,1  and  next  the  author's 
exposition  of  the  work  of  the  eternal  High  Priest  and  of  the 
foundation  of  the  new  covenant  leads  him  to  utter  an  earnest 
warning  to  his  readers2  to  hold  fast  this  splendid  heritage 
of  hope  and  to  see  that  their  actions  matched  it,  since 
the  most  terrible  punishment  was  in  store  for  him  who  sinned 
consciously  and,  as  it  were,  trod  Christ  under  foot  after 
having  known  the  truth.3  They  who  formerly,  in  times  of 
grievous  suffering,  had  proved  themselves  so  gloriously  by 
their  cheerful  self-sacrifice  and  patience,  must  not  now,  when 
the  day  of  recompense  drew  near,  cast  away  their  endurance, 
resignation  and  joy.4  Belief  without  trust  in  what  they 
believed  was  nothing,  since  faith  consisted  precisely  in  reliance 
on  good  things  hoped  for  but  invisible.  This  it  was  that 
was  so  vividly  attested  by  the  long  succession  of  the  heroes  of 
faith  from  Abel  down  to  their  own  day/'  Therefore  they 
too  must  show  some  of  the  patience  of  Him  who  was  crucified, 
especially  since  the  wholesome  chastening  which  they  endured 
was  sent  from  God 6 ;  they  must  follow  after  peace  and  holiness 
before  it  was  too  late,7  for  was  not  the  punishment  of  him 
who  spurned  the  revelation  of  God  in  Christ  so  much  the 
more  terrible  than  that  which  was  threatened  in  the  Old 
Testament,  as  the  perfect  appearance  of  God  in  the  heavenly 
Jerusalem,  the  new  heaven  and  the  new  earth,  was  more 
imposing  than  his  former  manifestation  to  Moses  in  fire  and 
smoke  and  rushing  wind  ? 8  Then  follow  a  few  special  exhor- 
tations,9 but  also  in  the  course  of  them  10  a  warning  against 
'strange  teachings,'  which,  perhaps  in  the  interests  of  a 
hair-splitting  spirit  in  the  choice  of  meats,  imperilled  the 
fundamental  notion  of  '  Jesus  alone,'  and  diverted  attention 
from  the  true,  spiritual  sacrifices.  The  end  is  formed  by 
vv.  18-25,  which  consist  of  personal  requests,  benedictions, 
charges  and  greetings. 

2.  We  have  now  to  establish — for  here  we  must  proceed 
with  the  greatest  care   from   firm  to  doubtful  ground — the 

1  E.g.,  ii.  1-4,  iii.  7-iv.  2,  iv.  14-16,  v.  11-vi.  12. 

2  x.  19-25.  3  x.  26-31.  4  x.  32-39. 

5  xi.  1-40.  6  xii.  1-11.  7  xii.  12-17. 

8  xii.  18-29.  9  xiii.  1-17.  10  Vv.  9-16. 


152       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

theory  that  Hebrews  represents  an  actual  letter  of  the 
same  sort  as  the  Pauline  Epistles,  and  not  merely  a  theo- 
logical treatise  or  a  sermon  in  epistolary  form,  like  the  Catholic 
Epistles.  It  is  true  that  it  lacks  the  superscription,  that  the 
introduction  savours  very  little  of  the  epistolary  style  and  that 
for  whole  paragraphs  at  a  time  the  author  gives  forth  his  re- 
flections without  reference  to  any  definite  readers  ;  while  the 
words  '  brethren,' 1  '  beloved  ' 2  or  *  holy  brethren,  partakers  of 
a  heavenly  calling  ' r>  do  not  mean  any  more  than  the  '  we ' 
that  occurs  repeatedly  from  i.  1  onwards  ;  for  the  author 
undoubtedly  assumed  that  he  was  speaking  to  Christians  like 
himself.  We  will  also  leave  vv.  xiii.  22-25 — a  passage 
which  bears  a  very  close  resemblance  to  the  Pauline  endings 
— out  of  account  for  the  present  in  the  conduct  of  our  argu- 
ment, since  many  critics  consider  them  to  be  a  later  addition 
appended  to  the  Epistle  in  the  interests  of  its  Pauline  author- 
ship, and  perhaps  analogous  to  chap.  xxi.  of  the  Fourth  Gospel. 
The  changes  from  'ye  '  to  'we,'  again,  or  vice  versa,*  seem  to 
indicate  that  the  whole  of  Christendom  was  implied  in  both, 
and,  above  all,  phrases  like  '  And  what  shall  I  say  more  ?  for 
the  time  will  fail  me  if  I  tell,  etc.,' 5  and  several  others,6  sound 
little  adapted  to  the  style  of  a  letter.  But  in  such  phrases  it  is 
merely  the  oratorical  training  of  the  author  which  is  brought 
to  light,  while  as  to  the  '  we '  we  must  make  a  sharp  distinction 
between  the  cases  in  which  it  represents  a  self-including  exten- 
sion of  the  warnings  addressed  to  the  '  ye  ' 7  and  those  in  which 
the  author  distinguishes  himself  from  his  readers  in  the 
'  plural  is  auctoris.' 8 

This  last-named  passage  (xiii.  18),  however,  obliges  us  to 
assume  that  his  circle  of  readers  was  definitely  circumscribed, 
for  at  that  date  an  author  would  scarce  have  claimed  the 
prayers  of  the  whole  of  Christendom,  least  of  all  on  the  ground 
of  verse  19,  '  that  I  may  be  restored  to  you  the  sooner.'  And, 

1  iii.  12,  x.  19,  xiii.  22.  2  vi.  9.  3  iii.  1. 

4  E.g.,  iii.  1  and  6,  iii.  13  and  14,  iv.  1,  Qofi-nQu/jLfv  ufaorf  .  .  .  ns  t£  vfjLwv ; 
xii.  1-3,  xii.  25,  xiii.  2-6. 

i  xi.  32.  ti  ii.  5,  viii.  1,  ix.  5. 

7  E.g.,  in  ii.  1  and  3,  but  also  in  Paul's  1st  Epistle  to  the  Thessalonians, 
v.  5''-10,  beside  1-5"  and  11. 

8  ii.  5,  vi.  9,  11,  xiii.  18. 


§  12.]  THE    KI'ISTLE   TO   THE    HEBREWS  153 

above  all,  the  praise  bestowed  on  his  readers  for  the  power  of 
self-sacrifice  which  they  had  manifested  in  the  past,1  and  for 
the  services  of  love  which  they  rendered  even  now  to  their 
fellow-believers,  could  not  have  applied  to  the  whole  of 
Christendom;  while  the  complaints  about  the  dulness  of 
hearing  that  had  come  upon  them  and  their  lack  of  progress 2 
are  of  course  only  applicable  on  the  assumption  that  the 
author  was  addressing  a  circle  of  readers  whose  moral  and 
religious  development  he  had  sympathetically  watched  for 
years,  and  to  whom  he  was  attached  by  ties  of  old  personal 
relations.  This  becomes  still  clearer  when  we  read  the  words 
of  vi.  9-12  between  the  lines  :  'But,  beloved,  we  are  persuaded 
better  things  of  you,  and  things  that  accompany  salvation, 
though  we  thus  speak  '  etc.  He  was  now  grievously  troubled 
about  them,  and  accordingly  wrote  them  a  long  epistle, 
beseeching  them  earnestly  to  suffer  themselves  to  be  warned 
in  time.  Such  an  epistle  lacking  an  address  seems,  it  is  true, 
a  monstrosity,  but  no  trace  has  survived  of  any  address,  and 
all  the  hypotheses  by  which  scholars  have  sought  to  explain 
its  absence — some  contending  that  it  was  a  matter  of  chance, 
and  others  that  it  was  intentional,  meant  to  conceal  the 
identity  of  the  real  author — have  something  unsatisfactory 
about  them.  No  reader  feels  the  want  of  anything  before 
verse  1,  and  vv.  1-3  form  the  most  excellent  introduction  to 
a  \6yos  Trapa,K\r)<r£ws ;  it  would  thus  seem  as  though  the 
superscription  with  the  address  never  constituted  an  integral 
part  of  the  Epistle  at  all  and  had  therefore  not  been  handed 
down  by  the  tradition.  With  all  reserve,  then,  I  would  ven- 
ture to  put  forward  the  suggestion  that — supposing,  indeed, 
no  separate  form  of  address  was  used — the  superscription  was 
omitted  as  a  precautionary  measure,  perhaps  because  the 
sender  was  obliged  to  entrust  the  transmission  of  his  manu- 
script to  Gentiles  whom  he  did  not  wish  to  inform  of  the 
nature  of  the  '  discourse '  that  they  were  forwarding,  or  per- 
haps because  all  intercourse  between  writer  and  recipients 
was  prohibited,  and  the  former  did  not  therefore  wish  to 
excite  remark  by  making  the  statements  at  the  head  of  his 
epistle  too  distinct.  If  this  is  not  the  right  solution,  we  must 

1  x.  32-34,  vi.  10.  '-'  v.  11-vi.  8. 


154       AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

assume  that  two  lines  or  more  have  disappeared,  consisting 
in  an  introduction  in  which  the  writer  explained  to  his 
readers  what  he  intended  to  set  before  them  and  by  what 
right  he  addressed  them :  informing  them,  in  fact,  that  he 
enclosed  for  their  perusal  an  address  of  exhortation.  This 
last,  then,  we  should  possess  intact  (i.  1-xiii.  21),  while  of 
the  framework  but  the  last  and  smaller  portion  (vv.  xiii. 
22-25)  would  have  been  preserved. 

3.  For  about  1500  years  the  tradition  of  the  Church  has 
almost  unanimously  held  that  Paul  was  the  author  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.  The  history  of  the  Canon  shows  us 
that  the  Eastern,  especially  the  Alexandrian,  Church  received 
Hebrews  early  into  its  corpus  Paulinarum,  and — with  many 
learned  hypotheses,  indeed,  as  to  the  draughtsman  of  the 
text — retained  it  there  unanimously  ;  that  in  the  West,  on 
the  other  hand,  it  was  known  even  earlier,  but  not  as  a 
Pauline  Epistle,  and  that  it  was  only  after  the  middle  of  the 
fourth  century,  under  the  pressure  of  Eastern  tradition,  that 
it  gradually  received  recognition  as  a  Pauline  Epistle  and  at 
the  same  time  found  its  way  into  the  New  Testament.  This 
suspicious  attitude  of  the  Latins,  who  certainly  could  not 
have  taken  exception  to  the  contents  of  the  Epistle,  at  any 
rate  during  the  decisive  period — later  they  might  have  been 
dissatisfied,  with  vv.  vi.  4-8— is  alone  sufficient  to  raise  a 
certain  doubt  as  to  the  trustworthiness  of  the  Pauline 
hypothesis  ;  our  next  endeavour  would  be  to  explain  their 
suspicions  as  arising  from  a  variant  tradition  as  to  the  author. 
And  here  we  find  in  effect  that  Tertullian  *  and  Novatian  2 
speak  of  Barnabas  as  such,  apparently  unaware  of  any 
doubt  as  to  '  his  authorship.  Then,  again,  it  is  very  easy  to 
see  how  in  seeking  for  an  author  for  the  Epistle — now  name- 
less, and  full  as  it  was  of  the  deepest  wisdom — Paul's  name 
was  thought  of,  for  not  only  was  Paul  the  Epistle-writer  tear' 
t!;o>xr)v,  but  the  antinomian  tendency  of  Hebrews,  and  the 
systematic  setting  of  the  new  revelation  and  the  new  covenant 
before  the  old,  seemed  entirely  Pauline  ;  isolated  sentences 

1  About  220.  *  After  250. 


§  12.]  THE   EPISTLE   TO   THE    HEBREWS  155 

and  words  l  not  less  so.  Who  but  Paul  could  have  written 
Heb.  vii.  18,  the  assertion  about  the  annulling  of  the  com- 
mandment because  of  its  weakness  and  unprofitableness : 
'  For  the  law  made  nothing  perfect '  ?  Verse  xiii.  9  surely 
suggested  Paul's  imprisonment,  and  perhaps  also  xiii.  3,  but 
the  mention  above  all  of  '  our  brother  Timothy '  '2  seemed  to 
force  the  assumption  that  the  same  man  was  responsible  for 
this  epistle  as  he  from  whom  1.  Thessalonians,3  Philemon  and 
2.  Corinthians  had  proceeded.  It  is  true  that  we  have  here 
treated  vv.  xiii.  22-25  as  genuine  ;  but  since  23  fits  in  so  well 
with  19,  and  22"  is  equally  appropriate  after  the  many  words 
of  blame  that  had  gone  before,  while  22'' — the  smooth  excuse 
of  the  practised  orator — falls  in  so  well  with  the  character  of 
the  whole  Epistle,  the  passage  seems  to  me  after  all  to  be 
more  comprehensible  as  the  chief  cause  of  the  attribution  to 
Paul  of  the  Epistle,  than  as  its  subsequently  invented  justi- 
fication. For  in  the  latter  case  the  inventor  must  have 
exercised  a  marvellous  self-restraint,  and  his  good  fortune 
in  that  none  of  the  friends  of  the  Barnabas-hypothesis  found 
out  his  stratagem,  must  have  been  even  more  marvellous. 

Nevertheless,  the  Pauline  hypothesis  must  be  absolutely 
given  up.  Even  its  first  enthusiastic  supporters,  the 
Alexandrian  masters  Clement  and  Origen  (about  and  after 
200  A.D.),  became  convinced  of  the  suspicious  fact  that  the 
style  of  Hebrews  was  utterly  different  from  that  of  Paul.  And 
indeed  the  difference  in  vocabulary  is  already  striking  enough  : 
for  instance,  the  Pauline  X/OWTTOS  'Irjaovs  is  altogether  absent, 
while  even  "lyo-ovs  X/DWTOS  is  only  to  be  found  in  three 
places  4 ;  a  favourite  conjunction  with  Hebrews  is  odsv,  which 
Paul  never  uses,  and  Hebrews  employs  the  word  avaicaivi^iv 5 
where  Paul  writes  avaicawovv  (avaKalvaxris).*  But,  above  all, 
the  manner,  the  style  and  the  temperament  are  entirely 
different  here  from  what  they  were  in  the  ten  Pauline 
Epistles  which  we  have  been  discussing.  Instead  of  the 

1  E.g.,   ii.  2,   cf.  Gal.  iii.  19 ;    ii.  10,  cf.  Eom.   xi.   36 ;   x.  10  fol.  19-23, 
xiii.  1-G. 

2  xiii.  23.  3  Esp.  ver.  iii.  2.  4  x.  10.  xiii.  8  and  21. 
5  vi.  6.                        '  2.  Cor.  iv.  1C  ;  Col.  iii.  10. 


156       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

irregular,  warm  and  personal  way  in  which  Paul  expressed 
himself— sometimes  so  condensed  as  to  be  unintelligible, 
sometimes  too  full  of  words,  but  always  lively  and  natural— 
the  style  of  Hebrews  is  smooth  and  rhythmically  rounded,  it 
runs  in  artistic  periods,1  is  equable,  still,  transparent  and 
sometimes  impressive,  while  here  and  there  it  is  adorned 
with  similes.  The  rhetorical  phrases  alone  which  are  men- 
tioned on  p.  152  above — and  to  which  might  be  added  us 
ITTOS-  sinew  (vii.  9),  the  sole  instance  of  this  expression  in  the 
New  Testament — point  to  a  different  education  from  that 
which  Paul  had  enjoyed. 

Altogether,  this  Epistle  is  written  in  better  Greek  than  any 
other  Book  of  the  New  Testament,  whereas  Paul's  writings 
are  always  tinged  with  Hebrew  colouring.  And  although  it 
has  been  proposed  to  avoid  these  difficulties  by  the  hypothesis 
that  Paul  had  written  the  Epistle  in  Hebrew,  as  being 
addressed  to  Hebrews,  and  that  what  we  possessed  was  merely 
a  very  clever  translation,  this  unfortunately  only  proves  that 
in  New  Testament  criticism  we  must  be  prepared  for  every 
folly.  The  faultless  elegance  of  the  language,  in  which  not 
even  subtle  plays  upon  words  are  wanting,  and  which  presents 
so  striking  a  contrast  to  the  rude  Greek  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment quotations,  would  be  beyond  the  reach  of  any  translator. 
Besides,  how  truly  wonderful  that  in  all  the  countless  quo- 
tations from  the  Old  Testament,  even  where  it  is  only  a 
matter  of  an  allusion,  his  renderings  are  always  correct  accord- 
ing to  the  Septuagint ;  was  this  translator,  then,  in  a  position  to 
look  them  all  out  in  his  Greek  Bible  without  exception  at  the 
right  place,  and  at  the  same  time  so  fortunate  as  to  be  able, 
even  where  the  Septuagint  diverges  in  sense  itself  from  the 
Hebrew  text — which  the  original  of  Hebrews  would  after  all 
have  used — to  remodel  the  context  without  a  sign  of  stumbling 
so  as  to  fit  in  with  the  altered  wording  of  the  references? 
Moreover,  even  in  the  introduction  of  these  quotations  the 
difference  between  the  author  and  Paul  becomes  apparent ; 
the  latter  uniformly  prefers  such  formulae  as  yeypaTrrai, 
\sysc  77  ypafaj  etc.,  while  in  Hebrews  these  are  totally  lacking ; 
it  is  God,  or  the  Holy  Spirit,  or  *  one  somewhere '  (God 

1  E.g.,  i.  1-4,  ii.  2-4,  14  fol.,  vii.  20-22  and  23-25. 


§  i2.j  TUP:  EPISTLE  TO  Tin-:  IIKUKKWS  157 

speaking  through  him,  of  course,  as  we  see  from  i.  1)  who 
says  here  what  Paul  makes  the  Scriptures  say,  except  when 
an  impersonal  X^yet,  siprjicsv,  EV  rco  \syso-0ai,  suffices. 

But  we  cannot  even  allow  the  Epistle  to  be  traced  back 
indirectly  to  Paul — to  be  considered,  for  instance,  as  composed 
by  the  order  and  in  the  name  of  the  Apostle  by  one  of  his 
companions,  so  that  all  the  peculiarities  of  form  could  be  set 
down  to  the  latter's  account,  while  the  ideas  (TO,  vo^ara, 
according  to  Origen)  were  preserved  to  Paul.  For,  to  begin 
with,  the  Epistle  does  not  contain  the  slightest  sign  of  pro- 
fessing to  be  written  with  Apostolic  authority — on  the  contrary, 
the  author  distinguishes  himself  from  ( them  that  heard  '  the 
Gospel  of  Jesus,1  which  Paul  could  never  have  done.  Then  it  is 
impossible  in  this  case  to  divide  the  form  from  the  matter  ; 
what  the  author  expresses  with  such  consummate  clearness 
and  certainty  are  not  ideas  thrust  upon  him  from  without, 
but  his  own  inmost  possession.  Finally,  it  is  true  that 
Hebrews  reminds  us  very  often  of  Paul  — so  strongly,  in  fact, 
that  a  direct  imitation  of  certain  passages,  at  least,  out  of 
Romans  and  1.  Corinthians  has  been  asserted  (and  Hebrews  v. 
12  fol.,  for  instance,  cannot  be  independent  of  1.  Cor.  iii.). 
But  this  dependence  is  not  necessarily  a  literary  one, 
and  the  author  of  Hebrews  may  have  appropriated  these  and 
other  Pauline  expressions  and  ideas  from  personal  intercourse 
with  Paul  or  with  a  Pauline  community. 

But  the  whole  theological  standpoint  of  the  author  of 
Hebrews  is  totally  unlike  that  of  Paul,  nor  can  it  be  under- 
stood simply  as  a  further  development  of  the  Pauline  point  of 
view.  The  Gentiles  (sBvrj)  are  not  once  mentioned,  nor  are 
Greeks  and  Jews ;  justification  by  faith  and  by  the  works  of 
the  Law  is  never  spoken  of,  but  we  hear  all  the  more  of  the 
perfection  which  manifests  itself  in  doing  the  will  of  God  ; 
here  we  do  not  find  the  genuine  Pauline  idea  of  faith,  but  one 
which  leans  decidedly  towards  the  side  of  hope  in  future 
possessions  2 ;  and  the  words  '  in  Christ,'  which  are  not  even 
lacking  in  Philemon,  may  be  searched  for  here  in  vain.  The 
Cross  of  Christ  is  certainly  mentioned  in  xii.  2,  and  his 

1  ii.  3.  2  xi.  1. 


158       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

sufferings  and  death  are  also  recalled  in  other  passages, 
but  not  with  the  same  fervour  as  with  Paul.  The  idea  of 
justification  has  disappeared  ;  the  antithesis  between  flesh 
and  spirit,  upon  which  Paul  founded  his  religious  con- 
ception of  the  world,  is  nowhere  brought  forward  as  the 
directing  force  in  the  process  of  salvation.  Paul's  mystical 
conception  of  this  has  vanished.  Hebr.  vi.  4  and  x.  29 
are  the  only  passages  of  the  Epistle  in  which  it  is  claimed 
that  any  trace  exists  of  the  lofty  feeling  which  marks 
the  possessor  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  and  even  there  the  ex- 
pressions are  not  Pauline.  It  is  true  that  in  the  picture 
of  Christ  there  is  nothing  antagonistic  to  the  Pauline  con- 
ception, but  there  is  a  difference  in  the  salient  points ; 
the  author  of  Hebrews  is  mainly  concerned  with  representing 
Jesus  as  the  Son  of  God,  who  came  from  heaven  to  earth 
and  returned  again  to  heaven  as  inheritor  of  the  dominion  of 
the  world,  as  our  example  in  obedience  and  our  fore- 
runner in  the  eternal  blessedness  which  consists  in  near- 
ness to  God.  In  its  Christology,  though  not  in  that 
alone,  Hebrews  stands  intermediate  between  the  Epistles 
of  Paul  and  John.  But  it  is  not  my  intention  to  give  a 
complete  enumeration  of  its  divergences  from  Pauline 
ideas  ;  further  evidence  against  the  tradition  will  appear 
hereafter. 

4.  Since  the  question  of  authorship  will  ever  remain  the 
most  critical,  let  us  now  attempt  to  set  down  the  internal 
evidence  to  be  obtained  from  Hebrews  as  to  its  origin.  Here 
we  find  that  the  date  may  be  fixed  at  once  with  tolerable 
probability.  Our  Epistle  was  unquestionably  used  in  the 
so-called  First  Epistle  of  Clement,  which  was  addressed  from 
Home  to  Corinth  shortly  before  the  year  100 ;  this  alone 
would  be  enough  to  fix  the  terminus  ad  quern  of  Hebrews  at 
about  the  year  1)5.  And  since  it  is  natural  to  consider  the 
'  Timothy '  of  xiii.  23  as  Paul's  old  friend,  this  would  be 
reason  enough  for  going  back  a  little  earlier  in  time,  for  this 
Timothy,  who  had  just  been  liberated  and  was  about  to  start 
ni  a  journey,  could  hardly  have  been  a  very  aged  man.  On 
the  other  hand,  it  seems  probable  that  Paul  was  dead,  for  so 
long  as  he  was  alive  it  is  difficult  to  find  room  for  this  im- 


§  12.]  THE    EPISTLE   TO   THE    HEBREWS  159 

prisonment  of  Timothy  ;  and,  more  than  this,  those  men  '  who 
had  the  rule  over  you '  and  who  '  spake  unto  you  the  word  of 
God  '  (xiii.  7),  had  by  now  brought  their  pilgrimages  to  an  end. 
It  is  natural  to  suppose  that  they  had  met  their  end  through 
martyrdom,  but  even  then  it  is  quite  arbitrary  to  confine  the 
expression  *  them  that  had  the  rule  over  you '  to  Peter  and 
Paul.  Ver.  ii.  3  does  not  say,  indeed,  that  Jesus'  hearers 
had  left  the  stage,  and  that  the  Apostolic  Age  had  disappeared, 
but  yet  a  certain  interval  of  time  is  implied  between  those 
primitive  days  and  the  Christianity  of  the  present.  Verses  v. 
12 l  and  vi.  7  in  particular  would  lead  us  to  assume  that  the 
Christianity  of  those  addressed  was  of  tolerably  long  standing  ; 
but  this,  after  all,  gives  us  but  an  approximate  idea.  An 
important  point  seems  to  be  that  in  x.  32-34  there  is  a  ques- 
tion of  '  the  former  days,'  in  which  the  addressees,  Christians 
already,  had  proved  themselves  in  the  grievous  afflictions  that 
had  come  over  the  believers,  partly  through  their  own  suffer- 
ings and  partly  through  their  faithful  comradeship  with  other 
heroes  of  the  faith.  Now  it  seems  that  a  second  trial  of  this 
sort  had  recently  set  in,  but,  to  the  writer's  sorrow,  with  few 
glorious  results.  Surely,  too,  vv.  xii.  1-11  and  the  whole  of 
chap,  xi.2  were  meant  to  kindle — not  merely  as  a  precaution- 
ary measure — their  courage  and  their  joy  in  suffering.  This 
suggests  the  persecution  of  the  Christians  under  the  Emperor 
Domitian  (81-9G),  at  least  to  those  who  consider  that  xiii.  7 
refers  to  the  martyrdoms  under  Nero. 

It  is  true  that  the  majority  of  scholars  place  the  Epistle 
between  the  years  64  and  70,  and  we  cannot  prove  the  im- 
possibility of  so  doing.  But,  besides  the  considerations  above 
mentioned,  the  isolated  features  of  the  picture  which  the 
Epistle  gives  of  the  contemporary  Christian  world  speak 
in  favour  of  assigning  it  to  a  later  date — say,  the  year  85. 
The  idealism  of  former  days  has  disappeared 3 ;  there  is 
no  longer  any  serious  belief  in  the  long  and  vainly  hoped- 
for  Second  Coming  and  the  heavenly  reward— especially  as 
so  many  persons  have  died  without  receiving  it4 — and,  at 
any  rate,  no  one  is  prepared  to  hazard,  if  need  be,  his 

1  '  By  reason  of  the  time,  ye  ought  to  have  been  teachers.' 

2  Esp.  vv.  35^-38.  *  xii.  3,  12  fol.  <  xi.  13,  40. 


160       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

honour  and  his  life  for  such  a  faith.1  A  careful  observer 
would  have  noticed  nothing  but  'retrogression  in  religion 
as  well  as  morals  2 ;  there  were  individuals  who  had  given 
up  attending  the  public  worship  of  God 3 ;  there  even  ap- 
pear to  have  been  cases  of  apostasy  and  shameless  denial 
of  the  Son  of  God.4  It  would  of  course  be  impossible  to 
assert  that  this  general  deterioration  was  only  possible  from 
a  certain  decade  onwards,  but  it  would  certainly  have  been 
more  probable  about  the  year  85  than  20  years  earlier.  The 
leaders5  were  certainly  no  clerical  order,  but  they  were 
already  noticeably  removed  from  the  '  saints.'  In  xiii.  7,  as 
in  xiii.  17,  they  are  something  more  than  the  TT polar? d^vot, 
of  1.  Thessalonians  v.  12  ;  they  have  become  the  shepherds  of 
souls  and  the  recognised  examples.  The  community  appears 
to  have  consisted  of  professional  teachers,  such  as  the  author 
himself,  and  of  pupils  ;  and  this  in  itself  is  little  favourable 
to  the  early  dating  of  the  Epistle.  Nor  is  there  anything 
positive  to  authorise  its  assignment  to  some  date  before  70  A.D., 
for  the  supposed  arguments  in  favour  of  it  are  connected 
with  a  faulty  exegesis.  For  Zahn's  cherished  discovery  in 
chronology,  that  the  '  forty  years  '  of  iii.  9  indicated  the  time 
between  the  crucifixion  of  Christ  and  the  destruction  of  Jeru- 
salem, rests  on  a  misunderstanding  of  the  symbolic  meaning 
of  the  whole  section  ;  according  to  the  spirit  of  Hebrews  we 
might  rather  reckon  the  forty  years  in  the  sense  of  iv.  2-4,  as 
the  whole  period  from  the  creation  to  the  Incarnation  of 
Christ.  It  shows  very  little  comprehension  of  the  author's 
mode  of  argument  to  discover  a  reference  to  Jerusalem  in 
xiii.  13,  or  to  conclude  from  the  fact  of  the  author's  calling 
upon  his  readers  to  leave  it  ('  for  we  have  not  here  an  abiding 
city ')  that  the  *  holy  city '  was  still  standing  (i.e.  that  he 
was  writing  before  the  August  of  70).  And  even  though 
the  institutions  of  the  Law — priests,  sacrifices  and  the  like— 
are  frequently,  though  not  without  exception,  spoken  of  as 
things  of  the  present,  (the  strongest  instance  of  this  is  ver. 
ix.  9,  though  only  if  we  read,  with  Luther,  /ca&'  ov  for  tca&'  r)v, 

1  iii.  6,  12-14  and  19,  iv.  1  fol.,  vi.  15,  x.  19-25. 

2  v.  11-vi.  8,  xii.  15  fol.,  xiii.  4.  •  x.  25. 

4  x.  29,  and  cf.  xii.  25.  5  xiii.  7,  17,  24. 


§  12.]  THE    EPISTLE    TO    THE    IIK15UEWS  161 

which  would  refer  to  7rapa/3o\ij  or  rather  to  fj  Trpwrrj  o-xrjvij),  it 
does  not  therefore  follow  that  the  Temple  of  Jerusalem  could 
not  have  been  destroyed  by  that  time.  For  the  writer  was  not 
speaking  of  the  Temple  at  all — the  word  vaos  does  not  occur 
in  the  Epistle— but  of  the  Mosaic  tabernacle  (cr/crjvrj).  Like 
many  others,  both  of  earlier  and  later  times,  he  works 
without  any  regard  to  historical  conditions,  thinking  only 
of  the  Scriptural  picture  of  the  Jewish  worship,  and  drawing 
his  knowledge  of  it  solely  from  the  Books  of  Moses. 

But  perhaps  the  most  preposterous  argument  cf  all  is  that 
based  on  ver.  viii.  13,  where  the  old  covenant  is  spoken  of  as 
1  nigh  unto  vanishing  away'  (syyvs  aQavio-fjLov),  and  therefore 
did  not  count  as  vanished  yet — as  though  it  did  disappear 
in  the  year  70  !  The  word  nigh,  of  course,  applies  to  the 
moment  when  God  spoke,  i.e.  Jeremiah  xxxi.  31  etc.,  and  the 
vanishing  away  began  at  the  moment  when  Jesus  inaugurated 
the  new  covenant.  If  we  were  to  affirm,  however,  that  the 
author,  supposing  him  to  have  witnessed  the  catastrophe  of  the 
year  70,  could  not  have  allowed  the  most  telling  argument  for 
his  super- Judaistic  attitude  to  escape  him — viz.  the  fulfilment  of 
the  doom  prophesied  against  the  earthly  Jerusalem — we  should 
be  confusing  our  own  feelings  with  those  of  the  unknown  writer  ; 
in  his  eyes  the  political  history  of  the  Jews  of  that  day  was  in- 
capable of  serving  as  evidence,  for  this  he  found  exclusively  in 
the  divine  revelation  as  manifested  either  in  the  Old  Testament 
or  in  Christ.  Were  it  not  so,  how  could  he  have  forgotten  that 
still  stronger  piece  of  evidence,  that  the  earthly  High -Priests  had 
bound  the  heavenly  High-Priest  to  the  Cross?  So  long,  then, 
as  we  do  not  know  when  Timothy  died,  there  is  no  reason  for 
considering  the  year  70  A.D.  as  a  terminus  ad  quern  ;  there  is 
nothing  against  fixing  the  date  between  75  and  90  A.D. 

5.  The  position  taken  up  by  most  investigators  with  regard 
to  the  question  of  the  date  of  Hebrews  depends  on  their  judg- 
ment as  to  the  object  of  the  Epistle,  and  certainly  some  definite 
information  as  to  its  destination  would  be  most  desirable. 
Where  are  we  to  look  for  the  community,  or  closely  connected 
group  of  communities,  which  we  have  already  ]  established  as 
forming  the  addressees  for  the  Epistle  ?  The  superscription 

1  Pp.  152, 153. 

M 


162       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP  n. 

Trpos  'Efipalovs  does  not  help  us  much  towards  a  decision,  for 
we  only  have  evidence  of  it  towards  the  end  of  the  second 
century  —  although  then  it  is  uncontested,  and  East  and 
West  possess  it  alike  ;  but  it  gives  far  too  strong  an  im- 
pression of  having  been  decided  on  to  suit  the  contents,1  by 
men  who  were  seeking  an  address  to  correspond  with  those  of 
the  rest  of  the  Pauline  Epistles.  It  is  for  us  only  a  piece 
of  the  same  ecclesiastical  tradition  which  has  shown  itself  so 
little  trustworthy  in  the  matter  of  the  author. 

But,  even  if  it  were  genuine,  the  choice  would  still  be  an 
open  one  between  (1)  Hebrew-speaking  and  therefore  Pales- 
tinian Christian  communities,  (2)  those  of  the  Dispersion 
consisting  of  former  Jews,2  and  even  (3)  Jewish  Christian 
members  of  a  great  Gentile  community — for,  after  all,  the 
addressees  can  only  have  been  baptised  Christians.  But  it  is 
only  the  force  of  tradition  which  can  possibly  explain  the 
astounding  fact  that  to  this  day  the  community  of  Jerusalem 
— which  did  indeed  migrate  to  Pella  in  the  year  66  or  67 — is 
seriously  considered  as  having  been  the  recipient  of  Hebrews. 
All  the  evidence  we  have  speaks  against  this  theory.  Even 
though  Greek  may  have  been  understood  in  Palestine,  it 
would  still  have  been  scarcely  suitable  to  address  an  epistle 
written  in  the  most  polished  Greek  to  the  Jewish-Christian 
community  of  Jerusalem,  while  to  have  made  use  of  the 
Septuagint  alone  would  have  been  naive  indeed.  Nor  is  it 
easy  to  suppose  that  the  Christians  of  Jerusalem  should  have 
looked  forward  so  eagerly  to  the  return  of  Timothy.  Accord- 
ing to  Gal.  ii.  10  the  community  there  was  miserably  poor,  but 
such  is  not  the  impression  we  receive  of  its  readers  from 
Hebr.  x.  34,  still  less  from  vi.  10,  whoever  may  have  been  the 
recipient  of  the  succour  there  mentioned.  And  is  it  probable 
that  our  author  would  have  waited  till  ii.  3  to  tell  such 
Christians  as  these  who  was  their  security  for  the  true 
Gospel — that  in  his  warnings  against  degeneration  and 
backsliding  he  should  have  overlooked  his  most  effective 
argument,  the  fact  that  they  were  walking  on  the  very  ground 

1  Thus  as  early  as  i.  1  we  have  '  the  fathers,'  in  ii.  10,  '  Abraham's  seed,' 
and  xiii.  13  is  still  more  suggestive. 

x  Thus  in  Philip,  iii.  5,  the  Tarsian  Paul  is  called  'EflpoTor. 


5  12.]  THE    EPISTLE   TO   THE    HEBREWS  163 

over  which  Jesus  had  borne  his  Cross,  and  on  which  he  had 
appeared  in  glory  as  the  Risen  One  ? 

There  are  fewer  objections  to  the  countless  other  hypotheses 
— such  as  those  of  Alexandria,  Antioch,  Jamnia  and  Ravenna 
— but  this  is  chiefly  because  we  know  next  to  nothing  of  the 
earliest  history  of  these  communities.  The  only  supposition 
that  is  really  encouraged  by  the  Epistle  itself — although 
absolute  certainty  is  nevertheless  out  of  the  question  —  is  that 
Hebrews  was  addressed  to  the  place  where  it  first  made  its 
appearance,  i.e.  to  Rome.  In  Rome  Timothy  was  certainly 
well  known  and  beloved,  and  he  might  have  been  expelled 
thence  for  a  time  by  the  authorities  ;  the  greeting  from  *  them 
of  Italy'  would  also  suit  Rome  well,  for  these  men  were 
probably  Christians  now  in  the  writer's  company,  but  far  from 
their  own  homes  ;  and  how  but  through  some  local  connection 
should  they  and  no  others  be  linked  so  closely  to  the  recipients 
of  the  letter  ? 

It  is  true  that  the  Roman  community  was  not  a  Hebrew 
one  in  the  year  90,  nor  even  in  the  year  66.  But  it  is  surely 
nothing  but  custom  and  an  imperfect  comprehension  of  the 
writer's  mode  of  argument  that  still  leads  so  many  to  con- 
sider the  Jewish-Christian  character  of  the  recipients  as  an 
axiom,  or,  as  they  put  it,  '  a  self-evident  conclusion.'  Even 
if  Rome  is  not  its  right  address,  ;we  must  still  assert  that 
Hebrews  was  directed  simply  to  Christians,  without  any  refer- 
ence to  their  nationality,  and  that  the  question  of  the  origin 
of  these  members  of  the  true  People  of  God  existed  neither 
for  the  writer  nor  for  the  readers  of  the  Epistle.  The  words 
*  the  fathers  ' '  and  '  the  seed  of  Abraham  ' 2  are  explained  by 
Romans  iv.  1  and  12 ;  and  passages  like  ii.  2  and  3  and  iii.  5 
and  6 — in  which  the  'we'  is  said  to  have  been  meant  as  an 
antithesis — if  anything,  prevent  the  identification  of  those 
called  to  the  salvation  of  the  New  Covenant  with  the  members 
of  the  Old.  Verse  ix.  15  does  not  by  any  means  oblige  us  to 
regard  those  '  that  had  been  called  '  as  the  perpetrators  of  the 
'  transgressions  that  were  under  the  first  covenant ' ;  it  is 
merely  the  writer's  object  to  teach  men  to  regard  the  death  of 
Jesus  as  much  in  the  light  of  a  termination  of  the  period  of 
1  1.1.  -  ii.  16. 

M    2 


164       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP  .11. 

transgression  as  in  that  of  an  introduction  to  the  period  of 
the  eternal  inheritance  ;  for  the  threats  of  punishment  in  the 
Old  Covenant  must  first  be  carried  out  in  that  death  before  the 
new  age  of  fulfilment  could  begin.  The  mention  of  the  many 
whom  Jesus  led  to  salvation  '  is  surely  meant  as  a  comparison 
with  the  '  small  people  '  of  the  Old  Testament.  In  ii.  9  we 
hear  that  Jesus  tasted  death  '  for  every  man,'  and  since  in 
vii.  27  and  xiii.  12  he  is  described  as  having  done  this  for 
'  the  people,'  and  as  having  been  able  to  make  propitiation  2 
for  the  sins  of  the  people,  this  means  something  different 
from  '  the  people  !  of  the  Old  Testament :  it  means  the  Elect, 
the  People  of  God.  In  vii.  11  and  ix.  19,  the  author  speaks 
of  the  people  to  whom  the  law  of  Moses  was  given  as  of 
an  alien  body.  Is  it  possible  that  the  saints,  whose  way 
into  the  Holy  Place  now  lay  open  before  them  for  all  time,3 
could  be  identical  or,  indeed,  even  commensurate  with  the 
people,4  whose  '  errors  '  could  only  be  imperfectly  removed 
by  the  worship  of  the  Old  Covenant  ?  And  does  the  descrip- 
tion of  his  readers  as  men  '  cleansed  from  dead  works  to 
serve  the  living  God ' 5  apply  so  very  aptly  to  converted 
Jews  ? 

A  still  stronger  argument  is  afforded  by  v.  12-vi.  5, 
according  to  which  these  readers  needed  again  and  again 
to  be  informed  of  '  the  rudiments  of  the  first  principles  of  the 
oracles  of  God/  and  even  of  such  things  as  '  repentance  for 
dead  works,'  '  faith  towards  God,'  '  teaching  of  baptisms  and 
of  laying  on  of  hands,'  ( the  resurrection  of  the  dead  and  the 
eternal  judgment.'  Of  these  things  it  was  surely  unnecessary 
to  remind  men  who  had  once  been  Jews.  Besides  this,  the 
faults  which  the  writer  contends  against  as  of  the  first 
magnitude  among  his  readers — fornication,  the  want  of  zeal, 
of  vigorous  faith  and  of  joy  in  hope — point  rather  to  A 
community  of  Gentile  Christians.  If,  however,  it  be  urged 
that  the  writer's  arguments  move  exclusively  upon  an  Old 
Testament  foundation,  and  that  chaps,  vii.-ix.  especially 
presuppose  an  intimate  acquaintance  with  the  religious 
ordinances  of  the  Old  Testament,  it  is  at  most  thereby  proved 


1  ii.  10,  ix.  28,xii.  15. 
«  ix.  7. 


1  ii.  17. 
•  ix.  14. 


ix.  ft. 


§   1L>.]  Till:    EPISTLE   TO   THE    HEBREWS  165 

that  many  Gentile  Christian  readers  must  have  misunderstood 
the  author's  meaning.  But  although  this  would  apply  to 
many  a  Jewish  Christian  reader  too,  and  although  the  specula- 
tions of  Hebrews  are  devoid  of  all  convincing  power  for 
us  to-day,  the  author  himself  certainly  believed  that  they 
would  have  a  great  effect ;  and  since  the  Christians  of  that 
day  had  other  needs  than  those  of  ours,  and  considered  it 
one  of  their  first  duties  to  be  fully  acquainted  with  the  Holy 
Scriptures — with  Leviticus  no  less  than  with  the  Psalms — 
they  probably  did  have  such  an  effect. 

But,  it  may  be  urged,  what  if  the  deadly  sin  mentioned  speci- 
fically and  threatened  with  the  direst  punishment  in  Hebrews — 
that  apostasy  against  which  the  writer  warns  us — signified 
(t-  relapse  from  Christianity  into  Judaism  ?  The  only 
passage  which  might  seem  to  suggest  this  interpretation  is 
xiii.  9-16,  where  the  advice  concerning  the  proper  sacrifices 
cind  such  as  would  be  well  pleasing  to  God  does  certainly 
sound  as  though  the  '  meats  '  which  were  so  important  in  the 
readers'  eyes  were  meats  of  sacrifice.  But  here  the  end  of 
verse  9  shows  precisely  that  the  readers  themselves  had  not 
yet  learnt  the  worthlessness  of  such  meats  (ol  TrspnrarovvTss 
are  not  the  same  persons  as  those  addressed  in  the  preceding 
/AT)  TrapcHpspsaQs :  a  theologian  of  the  first  century  would 
never  have  characterised  the  Judaistic  preaching  as  '  divers 
and  strange  teachings ') ;  rather  some  new  heresy  had 
recently  made  its  appearance  among  them — some  teaching 
of  a  Judaistic  character,  perhaps  like  that  of  Colossae, 
which  found  favour  with  the  Christians  of  that  day  in  their 
craving  for  reality.  But  that  this  was  not  the  most  serious 
danger,  but  only  a  symptom  of  the  general  falling-off  in 
religious  energy,  is  shown  by  the  mere  fact  that  it  is  only 
mentioned  cursorily  at  the  end  of  the  Epistle  and  met  by  the 
fluent  methods  of  an  artificial  exegesis.  Since  it  is  here,1 
however,  that  the  cry  is  raised,  'Let  us  therefore  go  forth 
unto  Jesus  without  the  camp  ...  for  we  have  not  here  an 
abiding  city,'  the  patrons  of  the  Hebrew  hypothesis  interpret 
this  as  a  summons  to  the  readers  to  leave  behind  them  the 
national  and  religious  fabric  of  Israel  to  which  they  belonged. 

4  ver.  13. 


166       AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

The  readers  themselves  would  hardly  have  understood  so 
dark  a  speech,  and  a  form  of  rhetoric  which  brought  in  the 
main  idea  of  the  Epistle  so  incidentally — a  propos  of  a  state- 
ment about  sacrifices — and  expected  success  to  follow  would 
indeed  be  strange.  The  going  forth  to  Jesus  is  equivalent  to 
a  searching  for  the  future  city,  and  the  camp  which  was  to  be 
abandoned  represents  the  outward  world  '  with  its  pleasures— 
in  fact  the  meaning  of  this  verse  is  exactly  the  same  as  that 
of  iv.  11,  *  let  us  give  diligence  to  enter  into  that  rest.'  Nor 
does  the  writer  speak  of  the  '  weakness  and  unprofitableness ' 
of  the  Law 2  out  of  anxiety  lest  his  readers  should  once  more 
subject  themselves  to  it,  but  because  it  was  in  this  way  that 
he  could  most  triumphantly  demonstrate  the  dignity  and 
sublimity  of  the  Christian  revelation.  He  knows  that  the 
fair  growth  of  the  Christian  spirit  among  his  readers  was 
threatened  less  by  false  teachers  than  by  all  manner  of 
temptations  to  sin,  to  recantation  in  adversity  and  trouble, 
when  their  endurance  was  put  to  too  severe  a  test,  and 
to  perplexity  concerning  the  prophecies,  whose  fulfilment 
was  too  long  delayed.  These  things  he  hopes  to  check  by 
making  it  clear  to  them  with  all  his  theological  skill  and 
all  his  earnestness  of  conscience,  that  the  >:  religion  of  the 
New  Covenant  rested  on  a  firm  3  foundation,  that  it  fulfilled 
all  the  prophecies,  and  with  its  infinite  wealth  in  heavenly 
goods  could  never  make  too  high  a  claim  upon  their  conduct, 
or  be  too  dearly  bought  by  any  sacrifice. 

I  repeat  once  more :  all  these  considerations  by  no 
means  exclude  Jewish-born  Christians  from  among  the  ad- 
dressees of  Hebrews ;  but  the  author  himself  is  at  bottom 
indifferent  as  to  what  the  brethren  had  believed  before  their 
enlightenment ;  for  him  Christianity  was  a  new  religion,  and 
it  is  principally  a  matter  of  accident  that  from  isolated  indica- 
tions let  fall  by  the  writer,  it  appears  that  he  himself  con- 
ceived of  his  hearers  as  former  idolaters.  But  it  was  only 
possible  to  ignore  the  difference  between  '  Gentile  and  Jew ' 
with  such  absolute  freedom,  after  Paul  had  completed  his 
mission,  with  its  profound  effect  upon  the  history  of  the 

1  x.  5,  xi.  7,  38.  *  vii.  18  fol. 

3  0c0aios,  ii.  2,  iii.  6,  14,  vi.  19,  ix.  17. 


§  12.]  THE   EPISTLE    TO   THE    HEBREWS  167 

world  ;  and  where  else  than  in  Rome  could  the  conditions 
for  this  attitude  of  indifference  have  been  so  favourable  ? 

Thus,  then,  we  find  both  Zahn  and  Harnack  agreeing 
as  to  Rome,  but  both  qualifying  their  assignment ;  Zahn  adds 
that  it  was  '  a  group  of  Roman  Christians  consisting  entirely  of 
native  Jews,'  while  Harnack  describes  them  as  *  a  small  circle 
of  Christians  (a  single  household  of  the  faithful)  in  Rome.' 
The  arguments  which  they  bring  forward  do  not  seem  to  me 
to  be  convincing.  The  theory  of  a  Jewish  group  has  been 
already  disposed  of,  and  why  should  we  suppose  that  the 
author  did  not  write  to  a  whole  community  ?  First,  they 
reply,  because  those  to  whom  the  Epistle  was  addressed 
formed  an  absolutely  united  and  harmonious  group,  and 
such  uniformity  in  religious  and  moral  conditions  would  have 
been  incredible  in  so  large  and  varied  a  community  as  that 
of  Rome.  But  we  do  not  know  whether  the  author  of  Hebrews 
had  sufficient  art  to  throw  light  on  the  different  shades  of 
opinion  which  certainly  existed,  or  whether  he  even  wished  to 
do  so :  was  not  his  chief  object,  perhaps,  to  bring  into  pro- 
minence the  fundamental  errors  in  which  one  and  all  were 
partakers  ?  The  larger  the  circle  to  whom  he  wrote,  the 
easier  would  it  be,  as  well  as  the  more  fruitful  from  an  edu- 
cational point  of  view,  to  employ  this  method  of  treating  the 
subject ;  it  would  have  been  little  short  of  tactless  in  address- 
ing a  household  of  which  he  knew  every  member  personally. 
Secondly,  it  is  urged  that  the  warning  in  v.  12  (that  his 
readers  ought  long  since  to  have  been  teachers)  would  not  be 
appropriate  if  addressed  to  a  community  in  which  youths  and 
new  converts  were  constantly  to  be  found  :  it  must  be  intended 
for  a  group  of  older  Christians.  But  did  the  house-commu- 
nity never  increase  ?  and  can  we  seriously  think  of  it  as  of  a 
school  from  which  in  course  of  time  bands  of  teachers  regu- 
larly emerged  ?  The  ofaiXovrss  elvcu  SiSdatcaXot,  is  intended 
to  be  taken  cum  grano  sails,  and  serves  to  emphasise  the 
contrast  between  the  ideal  and  the  real.  But  the  ideal 
could  be  applied  in  an  unqualified  degree  to  the  collective 
community,  whose  ultimate  aim  must  indeed  be  to  teach, 
even  though  all  its  members  did  not  attempt  it  in  so  subtle  a 
form  as  the  author  of  Hebrews,  or  even  by  word  of  mouth 


168       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

at  all.  Thirdly,  it  is  asserted  that  only  a  narrow  circle  of 
older  Christians  could  be  exhorted  '  to  remember  their  glorified 
leaders  of  former  times,  or  reminded  of  the  rich  fame  which 
they  bore  with  them  from  those  early  days ;  and  that  the 
words  *  we  desire  that  each  one  of  you  may  show  the  same 
diligence ' 2  sound  as  though  they  were  addressed  to  a  small 
homogeneous  group.  But  I  cannot  imagine  any  better  way 
of  stirring  up  the  sense  of  honour  in  a  large  community 
than  by  pointing  to  the  noble  features  of  its  past.  None  of  us 
in  a  similar  case  would  mention  the  exceptions — those  who 
had  had  no  share  in  them  ;  and  Paul,  for  instance,  would 
have  uttered  the  desire  expressed  in  vi.  11,  not  only  to  a  large 
community,  but  to  the  whole  of  Christendom. 

It  is  said  that  xiii.  17-24  cannot  easily  mean  any- 
thing but  that  the  addressees  had  their  own  rjyov/jisvoL,  but 
were  also  subordinate  to  the  ftyovpsvoi,  of  i  the  community.  I 
can  detect  no  difference  between  the  ^/OV^SVOL  of  ver.  17  and 
those  of  ver.  24 ;  the  jrdvras  which  is  quite  natural  in  the 
greeting  of  24  would  be  absurd  in  the  exhortation  to  obedience 
of  17  ;  and  *  all  the  saints  '  who  are  to  be  greeted  in  24 b 
are  not  the  other  Christians  outside  the  house-community,  but 
the  other  Christians  who  are  not  fyov/msvot,.3  To  interpret 
the  eTTio-vvaywryr)  savrcov  \  again,  as  a  separate  assembly  of 
this  narrow  circle  is  only  possible  if  we  assume  a  division 
of  the  collective  community  into  parishes  with  settled 
boundaries :  but  would  that  be  expedient  about  the  year 
85  A.D.  ? 

In  my  opinion  the  only  argument  left  for  the  household 
hypothesis  is  that  it  is  very  difficult  to  explain  how  the 
Komans  came  to  forget  the  origin  of  the  Epistle,  if  we  take 
for  granted  that  Hebrews  was  written  to  the  whole  Roman 
community  by  one  of  its  prominent  teachers.  But  since 
Harnack  considers  this  forgetfulness  to  be  intentional,  he  de- 
prives himself  of  this  point  in  his  argument ;  the  whole  com- 
munity, which  would  probably  be  dependent  on  a  few  leaders 
in  such  matters,  might  have  shared  the  intention  of  giving  the 
Epistle  another  name.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  riddle  is  not 

1   Ileb.  x.  32fol.,  xiii.  7.  2  vi.  11. 

•  Cf.  the  ifivra  of  2.  Cor.  xiii.  12  fol. ;  Philip,  iv.  21  fol.  *  x.  25. 


§  12.]  Till-:    EPISTLE    TO    THE    HEBREWS  169 

so  insoluble  if  the  author  was  not  an  Apostle,  but  only  some 
other  highly  honoured  member  of  the  community,  of  whom 
there  were  many  in  Kome.  The  letter  would  be  read  with 
gratitude  once,  and  then  laid  aside — the  more  readily  that  it 
w«is  considered  far  too  learned  for  the  average  Christian — and 
its  author  would  not  have  encouraged  a  cult  of  his  *  short ' 
epistle  if,  in  effect,  he  soon  returned  to  his  community  and  was 
able  to  continue  his  work  there  for  some  time  longer.  When 
the  public  began  once  more  to  take  an  interest  in  the  Epistle 
all  data  as  to  its  origin  had  disappeared,  and  it  was  not  the 
manner  of  that  age  to  undertake  methodical  investigations, 
which  might  have  yielded  satisfactory  results  even  then. 

But  those  who  cannot  accept  Eome  as  the  destination 
of  the  Epistle  can  choose  some  other  Italian  community,  or 
the  Italian  Christians  collectively ;  the  character  of  the 
Epistle  is  far  rather  '  Catholic  '  than  that  of  a  private  letter 
addressed  to  a  religious  clique. 

6.  Thus  it  is  almost  conclusively  proved  that  the  author 
was  closely  connected  with  the  Pauline  circle  (as  is  indeed 
indicated  by  the  '  Timothy  '  of  ver.  xiii.  23),  that  he  had  been 
active  as  a  teacher  in  Kome  for  a  long  period,  and  that,  at  a 
time  when  he  was  withdrawn  from  his  community  (probably 
by  force,  and  certainly  not  merely  for  a  short  space),  he  com- 
municated to  them,  in  the  form  of  a  didactic  epistle,  the  exhor- 
tations which  were  unfortunately  most  necessary,  and  which  he 
considered  it  dangerous  to  delay  until  the  time  of  his  hoped- 
for  return.  In  view  of  the  meagreness  of  the  New  Testament 
traditions,  however,  we  certainly  cannot  maintain  a  priori 
that  the  name  of  this  man,  so  full  of  the  Spirit  and  of  energy 
as  he  was,  must  be  found  somewhere  in  the  New  Testament. 
Since  it  became  necessary  to  give  up  Paul,  an  endless 
variety  of  names  have  been  suggested :  Apollos,  Barnabas, 
Clement,  Luke,  Silas,  and  lately  even  the  husband  and  wife 
Aquila  and  Priscilla.  Now  the  Epistle  betrays  no  sign  of 
composite  authorship,  but  only  shows  that  the  writer  was  not 
alone,  that  he  was  surrounded  by  Christians  who  were  like- 
minded  with  himself,  and  who  shared  his  fate  :  in  short,  that 
Hebrews  is  the  work  of  a  single  author  is  placed  beyond  all 
doubt.  Anything  which  may  be  adduced  in  favour  of  the 


170       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

Apollos  hypothesis  applies  almost  equally  to  Aquila  (or  to 
his  wife,  if  anyone  can  discover  a  feminine  temperament 
or  feminine  fancy  in  the  Epistle),  viz.  the  probability  of 
a  continuous  friendship  with  Timothy,  the  gift  of  teaching, 
the  high  culture  (Apollos  was  an  Alexandrian,  but  Priscilla 
and  Aquila  had  expounded  to  this  Alexandrian  the  tenets  of 
Christianity),  the  fiery  zeal  for  the  Gospel,  the  close  connec- 
tion with  Pauline  theology,  the  freedom  from  the  Law,  the 
familiarity  with  Pauline  forms  of  speech  not  necessarily 
resting  on  the  study  of  his  Epistles.  Indeed,  we  might 
have  expected  that  upon  either  of  these  the  Pauline  Gospel 
in  all  its  fulness  would  have  had  a  more  powerful  effect. 
We  do  not  know  whether  Apollos  ever  went  to  Home ; 
Aquila  and  Priscilla,  for  their  part,  left  Rome  about  52  A.D. 
and  generously  supported  Paul  in  Corinth  and  Ephesus ; 
they  could  in  no  case  have  founded  their  Roman  house- 
community  before  52,  but  must  have  gone  back  from  Ephesus 
to  Rome  and  again  have  emigrated  thence,  or  perhaps  have 
been  expelled  from  it.  Some  have  felt  justified  in  inferring  from 
Romans  xvi.  3  fol.  that  they  returned  to  Rome  before  58, '  in 
spite  of  the  passage  in  2.  Timothy  iv.  19,  where  they  are 
mentioned  as  living  in  Ephesus.  But  we  know  far  too  little 
of  the  group  which  surrounded  Paul  to  be  able  to  say  that 
only  Apollos  and  Priscilla  satisfy  the  demands  which  must 
be  made  for  the  author  of  Hebrews. 

For  Barnabas  there  is  the  evidence  of  the  Latins ;  but 
may  not  their  evidence  be  founded  on  error  there  no  less  than 
in  the  case  of  the  so-called  Epistle  of  Barnabas,  which  we  find 
among  the  Apostolic  Fathers  and  which  no  one  now  ascribes 
to  Barnabas  ?  Is  not  this  *  Barnabae  '  just  such  an  hypothesis 
of  the  Romans  as  the  Uav\ov  is  an  hypothesis  of  the  Alex- 
andrians ?  In  any  case,  we  should  have  to  suppose  that 
Barnabas  had  developed  greatly  since  the  event  spoken  of  in 
Gal.  ii.  13 — but  that  is  not  inconceivable.  Can  we,  however, 
credit  the  Levite,  to  whom  Jerusalem  was  thoroughly  familiar, 
with  misunderstandings  in  regard  to  Old  Testament  cere- 
monial such  as  those  of  ix.  3  fol.,  and  vii.  27  ?  According  to 
ix.  4  the  censer  stood  in  the  Holy  of  Holies  ;  according  to  vii.  27 

1  Against  this  see  above,  pp.  109-111. 


§12.]  Till;    EPISTLE    TO    TIIK    HKI5KEWS  171 

the  high -priest  offered  his  sacrifices  daily  for  his  own 
sins  and  the  sins  of  the  people  :  none  but  the  exegete  who 
takes  the  critical  method  of  Hebrews  for  his  model,  will 
believe  that  s^ovaa  Ov/juarripiov  signifies  only  an  ideal 
adjunct  of  the  altar  of  the  Holy  of  Holies,  and  that  /caO' 
rj^spav  means  the  same  thing  as  /car'  sviavrov.  Others  again 
see  in  such  errors  (which,  moreover,  need  not  be  taken  too 
seriously)  nothing  but  the  effects  of  a  mistaken  point  of  view  : 
the  author,  they  say,  drew  his  picture  of  Jewish  worship  only 
from  the  study  of  the  Scriptures.  This  is  a  point  against 
Barnabas,  and  the  absolute  indifference  of  the  writer  to  the 
antagonism  between  Jew  and  Gentile  would  be  as  remarkable 
in  him  as  in  Aquila,  Paul  or  any  others  who  had  fought  the 
battle  of  this  fundamental  principle.  For  the  argument  that 
Barnabas,  the  vlos  TrapaK^o-ews^  might  well  have  written  this 
\6yos  7rapaK\r)o-ea)st  as  the  Epistle  declares  itself  to  be,2  is 
surely  only  meant  as  a  joke.  Accordingly,  the  Barnabas  hypo- 
thesis is  not  one  which '  has  all  the  probabilities  on  its  side ' ;  but 
we  should  do  best  simply  to  decline  to  give  any  answer  to  the 
question  of  the  writer's  name.  It  would  be  far  more  valuable 
if  we  could  give  a  sketch  of  his  personality,  but  unfortunately 
the  author,  like  everything  personal  in  Hebrews,  retires  so 
much  into  the  background  that  we  must  confine  ourselves  to 
a  few  indications,  completing  what  was  said  on  pp.  149,  152 
and  153  above. 

The  safest  conclusion  is  that  in  him  ideas  fundamentally 
Pauline  were  combined  with  numerous  elements  of  Alexan- 
drian theology,  in  such  a  way  that  he  must  be  looked  upon  as 
a  unique  phenomenon  in  the  history  of  the  first  century. 
The  author  was  a  Paulinising  Christian  of  Alexandrian  edu- 
cation. Arid  since  there  was  only  a  Jewish  Alexandrinism  at 
that  time,  he  must  have  received  this  education  and  brought 
it  with  him  into  Christianity  as  a  Jew— for  to  consider  him 
as  a  Gentile  by  birth  at  such  an  early  period  would  surely  be 
somewhat  bold.  That  he  had  read  the  works  of  the  leader  of 
the  Jewish  school  of  Alexandria,  Philo,3  is,  if  not  absolutely 
beyond  question,  at  least  extremely  probable,  when  we  consider 
his  relatively  numerous  points  of  contact  with  that  writer, 

1  Acts  iv.  36.  2  Heb.  xiii.  22.  a  Died  A.D.  40. 


172       AN   INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

e.g.  in  his  Christological  terms.  For  it  goes  without  saying, 
that  the  similarity  between  him  and  Philo  was  in  a  sense 
*  formal  and  confined,'  seeing  that  the  latter  had  remained  a 
Jew  while  the  author  of  our  Epistle  had  become  a  Christian. 
His  taste  not  being  identical  with  that  of  the  modern 
'  historian '  he  probably  did  not  find  the  writings  of  the 
Alexandrian  Jew  so  distressingly  dull.  The  form  of  exegesis 
in  Hebrews,  consisting  in  a  reasoning  from  symbols,  is  very 
Philonian,  and  the  description  of  the  Holy  Place  and  the 
Holy  of  Holies  as  the  first  and  second  tabernacles,1  in  con- 
nection with  the  first  and  second  Covenants,  is  a  model  of 
this  kind.  The  antitheses  between  shadow  and  reality,2 
created  and  uncreated/  things  divine  and  things  earthly,4 
things  of  the  past "'  and  things  to  come G  (which  for  the  believer 
indeed  are  already  present),  things  transient  and  things 
enduring,7  rule  the  thoughts  of  the  exegetist,  not  that  between 
sin  and  grace.  What  was  essential  in  his  eyes  to  a  true 
comprehension  oi  the  Old  Testament  revelation  was  to  recog- 
nise behind  the  shadow,  the  emblem,  the  parable,  the  antitype 
(sl/cwv,  <T/cia,  vTrobsiy/jia,  7rapa/3o\iji  avrLrvTrov)  the  forms  of 
the  things  themselves 8 ;  and  the  more  artificial  and  far- 
fetched were  the  means  of  attaining  to  such  knowledge,  the 
more  convincingly  would  they  act  upon  the  disciple  of  such  an 
art.  With  the  complete  lack  of  historical  sense  characteristic 
of  Alexandrinism,  it  entirely  ignores  such  historical  questions 
as  that  of  the  religious  value  of  the  Jewish  worship,  practised 
as  it  was  or  would  still  be  according  to  the  letter.  Such  a 
question  could  only  excite  interest  in  so  far  as  it  supplied  the 
colours  for  the  religious  ideal  to  be  depicted. 

Professor  Kiehm  has  tried  to  prove  that  the  leading 
theological  ideas  in  Hebrews  are  of  Palestinian  origin-  e.g. 
that  of  the  Sabbath  rest  of  the  Children  of  Israel — but  has 
stated  the  fundamental  question  wrongly,  so  that  his  lengthy 
work  on  the  doctrinal  ideas  of  Hebrews  (1867)  is  no  more 
than  a  sign  of  retrogression.  We  could  not  do  our  author  a 

1  viii.  7-ix.  1*2.  2  *>  O-KTJK/?  rj  a\ij6irf),  viii.  2,  and  cf.  ix.  24. 

1  ix.  11.  *  ix.  1,  x.  5,  vi.  4,  viii.  5,  ix.  23.  s  ix.  9. 

6  fjif\\<av  aiwt*,  /jLf\\ovra  kyaOd,  and  the  like  :    vi.  5,  ix.  11,  x.  1,  and  cf. 
xi.  20. 

7  vii.  3  and  24,  x.  34,  xii.  27  ;   xiii.  14.  *  x.  i. 


§  12.]  THE    EPISTLE    TO    TIFF,    11  KBRKWS  173 

greater  wrong  than  by  bringing  him  into  direct  connection 
with  the  Christianity  of  the  Primitive  Apostles.  Nowhere 
does  he  declare  himself  to  be  their  disciple,  least  of  all  in 
ii.  8,  where  '  even  ol  dicovo-avTss  can  scarcely  refer  exclu- 
sively to  the  Primitive  Apostles,'  and  still  less  can  the  author 
alone  be  understood  in  fmas.  Only  the  eyes  that  are  endowed 
with  the  power  of  searching  the  Apostolic  world  of  thought 
in  its  other  aspects  also,  can  see  that  the  mortal  shape  of 
Jesus  was  present  to  our  author's  mind  quite  otherwise  than 
to  that  of  Paul — in  colours  more  vivid — and  this  precisely 
on  the  ground  that  he  possessed  the  testimony  of  eye- 
witnesses. Are  we  to  suppose  that  the  fact  mentioned  in 
Hebrews  xiii.  12,  that  the  hill  of  Golgotha  lay  outside  the 
gates  of  Jerusalem,  was  known  only  in  Primitive  Apostolic 
circles  ?  The  merit  of  Riehm's  theory  lies  in  its  recognition 
of  the  fact  that  the  incarnation  of  the  Son  of  God  and  his 
sojourn  on  earth  was  of  greater  religious  importance  to  the 
author  than  to  Paul :  yet  this  is  not  a  sign  of  pre-Pauline 
thought,  but  of  victory  over  Pauline  one-sidedness.  The 
theologian  of  the  second  Christian  generation  is  seen  through- 
out. In  reality  Hebrews  is  in  its  essential  points  further 
removed  from  the  Primitive  Apostles  than  Paul  himself ;  its 
author  thinks  no  longer  of  a  settlement  with  Judaism ;  he 
knows  of  no  prior  rights  of  the  Israelites  under  the  New 
Covenant.  The  stress  he  lays  upon  sane  tifi  cation,  upon  good 
works,  and  upon  obedience,  is  not  specifically  primitive 
Apostolic  ;  it  is  rather  primitive  Catholic. 

Thus  we  willingly  renounce  the  idea  of  finding  a  name  for 
a  great  unknown  ;  we  can  understand  the  Epistle  and  assign 
it  an  historical  value,  without  knowing  its  gifted  author  by 
name.  It  is  a  document  of  post-Apostolic  times,  and  to  us 
it  is  almost  pathetic,  because  it  shows  us  one  of  the  best  men 
of  those  days  labouring  by  means  of  the  subtleties  of  his 
artificial  theology  to  reanimate  the  spirit  which  was  threaten- 
ing to  vanish  from  among  the  multitude  ;  we  see  a  represen- 
tative of  the  ecclesiastical  aristocracy  then  in  progress 
of  formation,  impressed  with  the  sense  of  each  believer's 
responsibility  for  the  rest '  ;  his  work  is  the  most  living 

1  xii.  15. 


174         AN     IN  TKnmri'loN     To    Till:     NKW     TKSTA  M  K.NT    [OKAt.  Zt 


proteet  wa  potMM  against  the  piVti  ati  faeiion  of  a 

collection  of  indep.  -udeiil,  commimil  ies. 

A  stato  of  spiritual  indifference  such  as  is  coiuhaled  I>y 
the  writer's  strong  idealism  mijdit  ;ii  one  tin  in  or  another 
li:i,vo  come  over  any  community,  and  therefore  the  Epistle 
would  from  the  very  lirHt  (lay  of  its  appearance,  even  if  it 
was  only  intended  For  Kome  or  I'nteoli,  !i;i  ve  heen  equally 

M|  lo  other  ChristiaiiH.  It  has  a  ri^lit  todwjill  in  the 
('mum,  in  spite,  of  its  Ahixjuidriiin  suM  h-l  ics,  for  llirou^li  it 
then;  Inviithns  Hoiuothin^  of  tlicj  spirit  <•!  tin-  first  ^rout  uge. 


§  IB.  The  Pastoral, 


I  II.  A.  \v.  &feyer,  vol.  d.  ;  'nnioihy  ,-uid  Titus  i»y  i;.  \v.  Weiss, 

;(«•(!.(;);  [Iiuul-C!onuncntar  iii.  1;  Col.  Mph.  IMiilnn.  I'.-islonil 
Mpii-.ti.-.,  !,\  1  1.  von  s.nirii,  IM(J;{  (,M|.  '.}).  Thebesl  tpeoialoommen* 

i  ,  !li;it,  l>\  I  1.  ,1.  !lolt/.in;i,mi  (  1  880),  which  con  l;iiir;  ;i,  "rr:it  doal 
of  in  fort  n;i,ti<>i)  on  the  .  .1  ml  ,-rit  icisin  :i.h  vad  y  n.pjdicd  to  this 

siihjcc.l.  Tin-  iiiono^r;i,|ili  of  V.  ||.  I  Irssr,  '  Die  Kilts!  eliuii;;  di-r 
N/r.lic.hrn  llirtcid.ricf.  ,'  L889,Mekl  tO  provi-  l,h:i,L  Hie  Uirr.u  Epistles 
Orere  tonnrd  from  M.  genuine  I'liuliiie  loiindiLtion  hy  rcc;isi  in^s,  hy  the 
idditiOM  Q!  copyists,  ;md  jihove  :ill  hy  the  incorporation  of  other 

nioa]  document!  J  hut  it,  has  littlr  method,  and  therefore  little 
eonviiiciii^  power.  Coi  1  1  r  i  hi  1  1,  i  o  1  1  :;  lo  the.  discussion  are  to  !)••  found 
in  V.  SpilU's  '  /m  (ieseh.  und  Lilt.  d.  Urchi  isteiit  hums,'  i.  1893, 
pp.  :\!>  •!!>,  and  A.  1  I  artuick's  '  Dit^  Ghronolo^ir  der  :i  Iteln  istlichen 
hitt.'i.  1H97,  pp.  4HO 

I.  l(1or  iihout  a  ctMiiury,  the  n:inie  of  l'ji.stor;i.l  Epistles 
has  heen  applied  to  tho  three  letters  which  we  find  in  the 
New  T.  t.mient  addressed  to  Timothy  und  Titus  under  the 
name  of  Paul,  and  containing  instructions  as  to  their  pastor;il 
lahours  ainon;^  Christian  coimmimf  ies  ;  no  ohjection  can  he 
d  against  it. 

The     Kirst    Epistle   to   Timothy   Ix^'ins   innuedi.itely 
I  he  addn-ss  and  tfrootintf  lo  s|»eak  of    false  le;irhers  who  dealt 
in  mythologies,  and  who,  while  the  Law  was  yet  indispensahl, 
for   sinners,    represented    a    false   anl  inomia  iiism.1      The    id.  •, 
that  1'aul  would  have  heon  fully  coinpetont   to   deal  with  tin 

1   i.  ;{   ll. 


i.;  TIIK    PA0TOBA1    BF  175 

subject  (&  iTTHTTevOiii'  ^7w)  '  loftdH  up  to  ii  thanksgiving  to  the 

mercy  of  (io«l  in  bavin;-  transformed    him,  <>nce  ;i,  blasphemer 

and   a   persecutor,    into  a  urn  I  In-  ( lospel    for   sinners.'-' 

In -rita^o  with  ;ill  its  retpOniibilitieS,  but  also  ;ill  its  n 

those  who  full  away,  ho  hiMpicai  bed  to  Timothy.       To  thin 

he  ad<  i  oertain  corresponding  instructions :  first,  that  \.  I 

111.. i-d  were  Christians  pniyers  should  ho  made  for  ;ill  UK  n, 
includin;',  kings  and  rulers4 — this  being  based  on  the  uni- 

;i,litv  of  the  divine   decree  of  mercy — and   then   aH   to 
1,1  ir.  niiuiiHir   in   \vhi«-l  hoiild    pray   un«l    tlie   domcianoiir 

proper  for  women  both  while  praying  and  at  other  times.0 
Ih-rc,  followH  an  oiiuincration  of  tin:  conditions  nnjuirrd  for 
attaining  the  oflire  of  biHhop,'1  and  then  for  that  of  deacon,7 
while  in  conclusion  emphasis  is  laid  on  the  importance  of 

6  dir<<t ions,  since  the  House  of  God  was  in  (piestion 
the  pillar  of  truth';  in  contemplating  which  the  author 
breaks  out  into  a  hymn  in  praise  of  the  j^reat  mystery 
of  godliness  and  of  Him  who  was  manifested  in  the  flesh. 
Chap.  iv.  is  devoted  to  a  description  of  ihe  particular  duties 
of  Timothy:  first,  with  regard  to  false  doctrines  of  dualistie 
and  ascetic,  tendency,  which  diverted  attention  from  the  main 
Iliness'1  ;  and  then  touching  his  own  personal  con 
duct.1"  Chap,  v.,  too,  bej/ins  with  advice  for  hi  hehftVioOT 
in  liis  intercourse  with  the  old  and  the  youn^,  and  continues 
in  apparently  the  same  strain  on  the  subject  of  the  widows," 
except  that  here  the  tone  of  the  master  directly  addren 
his  disciple  is  once  more  replaced  by  that  of  the  teacher  of 
Canon  Law,  as  in  the  passages  about  the  elders  ' '  and  about 
I  be  duties  of  slaves.1''  Between  these  last  two,  however,  coin- 
three  verses11  connected  with  what  goes  before  by  an 
association  of  ideas  only  to  be  explained  as  corning  from 

:in  definite  experiences  of  the  writer's  ;   in  them  Timothy 

is  charged  for  his  health's  sake  ev<  n  to  tftkfi  a  little  wine,  and 

assured   that   in  cases  of  sin  as  well  as  of  good 

works  everything  would   be   brought  to  lijdM.      I-'rom  hereto 


N  il. 

••  ii.  s  i.-,. 

•   iv.   1 
11  vi.  1  und  2. 

1  i.  1  • 
•  iii.  1    7. 
'•iv.  11   JO. 
14  v.  23-25. 

«  L  18-20. 
7   iii.  H    13. 
"  v.  3-10. 

'  IL  1    7. 
"  iii.  1  1  fol 
11  v.  17  22. 

176        AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

the  end '  we  have  an  earnest  exhortation  to  hold  fast  in 
seriousness,  truth  and  purity  the  wholesome  word  of  Christ 
to  the  end  of  the  world,  heedless  of  the  false  teachers'  strife 
of  words.  Vv.  vi.  17-21  bear  the  marks  of  a  later  addition, 
the  first  three  containing  rules  for  the  rich,  and  the  last  a 
protest  against  'so-called  knowledge  (gnosis).' 

In  the  Second  Epistle  to  Timothy  the  address  and  greeting 
are  followed,  as  we  are  accustomed  to  find  in  Paul's  Epistles, 
by  a  thanksgiving  and  prayer,  the  latter  to  the  effect  that 
Timothy  might,  like  Paul,  in  spite  of  all  sufferings,  continue 
in  his  steadfast  faith  and  in  sound  doctrine.2  After  a  few 
personal  observations 3  the  thread  of  i.  14  is  caught  up  again 
at  chapter  ii.  ;  Timothy  is  exhorted  to  learn  to  wait  steadfastly, 
rejoicing  in  the  battle,  for  the  fruits  of  his  labours,  which 
could  not  fail  to  appear,4  and  while  holding  aloof  from 
heretical  disputations  and  foolish  hair-splittings,  to  work  in  all 
gentleness  and  virtue  for  the  recovery  of  those  who  had 
been  led  astray.5  From  iii.  1  to  iv.  5  a  more  exact  description 
is  given  of  the  various  forms  of  these  vessels  of  dishonour  in 
the  House  of  God — vessels  which  now,  in  the  last  days,  must 
reveal  themselves ;  it  was  for  Timothy  to  fulfil  the  duties  of 
his  office  towards  them,  in  steadfastness  and  temperance, 
following  the  teaching  and  the  example  of  Paul  and  furnished 
completely  with  all  sacred  knowledge.  Paul  himself  felt  that 
he  was  nearing  his  end.6  Upon  this  a  number  of  personal 
communications,  charges  and  greetings  7  lead  up  to  the  final 
blessing. 

The  Epistle  to  Titus,  which  is  about  half  as  long  as 
the  First  Epistle  to  Timothy — the  Second  Epistle  standing 
midway  between  the  other  two  in  this  respect — has  a  some- 
what longer  superscription.8  First  of  all,  the  principles  are 
laid  down  9  which  were  to  govern  the  choice  of  the  Elders, 
this  being  a  particularly  important  point,  because  there  existed 
a  detestable  heresy  which  had  lately  been  making  formidable 
progress.10  Vv.  ii.  1-10  prescribe  the  manner  in  which, 

1  vi.  3-16,  for  the  doxology  and  Amen  come  at  verse  16. 

2  i.  3-14.                                      *  i.  15-18.  '  ii.  1  13. 
4  ii.  14-20.                                     iv.  6-8.  '  iv.  9-21. 
•  i.  1-4  (cf.  Rom.  i.  1-7).           9  i.  5-9.  lo  i.  10-1D. 


§  13.]  THE    PASTORAL   EPISTLES  177 

according  to  sound  doctrine,  the  old  men,  the  women,  the 
young  men  and  the  slaves  were  to  be  treated :  that  is,  what 
rules  were  specially  to  be  impressed  upon  these  respective 
classes,  for  God's  mercy  required  a  decided  renunciation 
of  worldly  lusts  from  all  alike.1  Titus  is  then  commanded 
to  watch  over  his  own  authority,  to  see  that  obedience  was 
rendered  to  rulers  and  to  secure  quiet  living,2  for  with  the 
regenerate 3  good  works  must  take  the  place  of  the  old  vices. 
Upon  this  follow  a  few  short  directions  for  his  treatment  of 
false  teachers  and  schismatics,1  and  then  a  few  messages  and 
greetings  and  the  final  blessing. 

2.  The  most  superficial  glance  at  the  contents  of  the  three 
Epistles  will  be  enough  to  demonstrate  their  close  connection 
one  with  another.  Just  as  they  appeared  at  the  same  moment 
in  history  and  have  almost  without  exception  stood  side  by 
side  in  the  New  Testament,  so  they  mutually  correspond  in 
word  and  thought — perhaps  even  more  remarkably  than  does 
Ephesians  with  Colossians.  Hence  they  can  only  be  examined 
in  common,  and  we  are  led  from  the  very  outset  to  expect  a 
common  origin  for  all  three.  It  is  true  that  the  first  attempt 
at  criticism  on  this  domain  was  Schleiermacher's  denial5 
of  the  Pauline  authorship  of  1.  Timothy  alone,  while  later 
writers,  too,  have  wished  to  consider  2.  Timothy  at  least  as 
authentic,  although  they  have  abandoned  1.  Timothy  and 
Titus.  But  more  difficulties  are  hereby  created  than  removed. 
The  three  Epistles  are  dominated  but  by  one  object — that 
of  providing  guarantees  for  the  steady  continuance  of  the 
Christian  community-life  upon  a  sound  Apostolic  basis. 
This  was  to  be  brought  about,  first,  by  a  decided  rejection  of 
all  false  doctrine  and  schismatic  tendency ;  secondly,  by  the 
establishment  of  strict  rules  of  morality  and  discipline  in  all 
classes  of  the  community,  and,  thirdly,  by  the  intelligent  and 
careful  organisation  of  the  clerical  order — i.e.  the  offices  and 
stations  of  honour — an  institution  which  would  be  the  means 
of  doing  most  for  both.  The  latter  is  dwelt  upon  least  strongly 
in  2.  Timothy,  and  most  in  1. ;  the  second  finds  expression 
most  abundantly  in  Titus,  while  in  2.  Timothy  the  personal 

1  ii.  11-14.  -  ii.  15-iii.  2.  a  iii.  3-8  (cf.  ii.  11-14). 

4  iii.  9-11.  *  In  1807. 


178       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

and  epistolary  style  is  better  represented  than  it  is  in  1.  and 
in  Titus.  In  spite  of  these  differences,  however,  the  Epistles 
still  present  the  appearance  of  a  single  whole.  In  their  lan- 
guage they  display  a  remarkable  similarity,  nor  do  Titus  and 
1.  Tim.  constitute  by  any  means  a  separate  group,  partially 
opposed  to  2.  Timothy,  while  a  fairly  large  number  of  some- 
what unusual  expressions  are  only  to  be  found  here  in  the 
whole  of  the  New  Testament,  but  here  in  all  three.  Such 
is  the  expression  TTKTTOS  6  \6yos,  '  faithful  is  the  saying,' 
which  occurs  thrice  in  1.  Timothy  and  once  each  in  2.  Timothy 
and  Titus.1  There  are,  moreover,  whole  sentences  which 
exhibit  almost  verbal  agreement :  such  as  the  sis  b  srsO^v  syco 
tcijpvl;  teal  aTToa-roXos'  of  1.  Timothy  ii.  7  and  2.  Timothy  i.  11, 
and  numerous  others.2 

3.  Nearly,  however,  as  the  three  Epistles  are  related 
to  one  another  both  in  form  and  matter,  so  far  are  they 
removed  from  the  genuine  Epistles  of  Paul. 

(a)  It  is  true  that  Paul  did  write  to  individual  persons, 
that  he  would  have  approved  of  the  tone  of  these  Epistles, 
and  that  he  himself  was  accustomed  to  oppose  false  teachers 
and  to  demand  their  unequivocal  rejection  by  others.  He 
was  acquainted  with  bishops  and  deacons,3  as  early  as 
1.  Thessalonians 4  he  exhorted  his  readers  to  recognise  those 
that  were  placed  in  authorit}'  over  them,  and  we  might  find 
a  parallel  for  the  rules  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles  concerning  the 
old  and  the  young,  men,  women  and  slaves,  in  the  domestic 
codes  of  Colossians  and  Ephesians.  Much  in  the  Epistles 
has  precisely  the  Pauline  ring :  the  addresses,  the  greetings, 
personal  communications  like  those  of  2.  i.  15-18  or  iv. 
16-18  and  6-8,  and  many  other  things  of  the  kind.5 
Striking  expressions  like  yovevcriv  aTruOslsf  or  Kara  TO 
evayy£\iov  pov 7  are  common  to  2.  Timothy  and  Romans, 

1  1.  Tim.  i.  15,  iii.  1  and  iv.  9  ;  2.  Tim.  ii.  11  ;  Titus  iii.  8,  and  cf.  i.  9. 

2  E.g.,  1.  Tim.  vi.  11  and  2.  Tim.  ii.  22  :  Titus  i.  6-9  and  1.  Tim.  iii.  2-4  ; 
Titus  i.  16  and  iii.  1  and  2.  Tim.  iii.  17  (vpbs  irav  fyyoi>  ayaQov)  •  and  1.  Tim. 
iii.  9  and  2.  Tim.  i.  3  (iv  xaQapa  <rw«t8-h<T€i). 

3  Philip,  i.  1.  <  v.  12. 

g.,  the  chain  of  clauses  in  1.  Tim.  from  i.  II1'  to  1H. 
8  '2.  Tim.  iii.  '2  and  Eom.  i.  30. 
'  ~2.  Tim.  ii.  8  and  Rom.  ii.  16  and  xvi.  2.". 


§  13.]  THE    PASTORAL    EPISTLES  179 

while  the  phrase  TO  svayye\iov  rijs  Sof???  is  found  both  in 
1.  Timothy  and  2.  Corinthians  !  ;  Trio-rsvsa-dai  in  the  sense  of 

*  to  be  entrusted  with  '  is  only  to  be  found  in  Paul's  Epistles 
outside   1.   Timothy 2  and  Titus,:i   and   in   the  sense  of  '  to 
be   believed   in '    appears   only   in   2.    Thessalonians  4     and 
1.  Timothy.5     This  resemblance  extends,  moreover,  to  such 
innocent  forms  of  expression  as  afyopfjLrjv  SiSovai  rti/t,  which 
occurs  only  in  1.  Timothy6  and  2.  Corinthians,7  while  a^op^ 
appears  elsewhere  only  in  Paul,  and  that  five  times. 

But  if  we  dispute  the  authenticity  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles, 
such  points  of  contact  are  easily  to  be  explained  by  the  intimate 
acquaintance  with  genuine  Pauline  Epistles  which  we  must 
of  course  suppose  the  Pseudo-Paul  to  have  possessed.  He 
wished  to  pass  for  Paul,  or  at  least  to  address  his  contem- 
poraries in  the  person  of  Paul,  and  it  is  therefore  natural 
enough  that  he  should  have  imitated  the  real  Paul.  He  had 
studied  the  Apostle  and  sat  in  spirit  at  his  feet— and  not 
without  effect — for  many  years  before  he  ever  conceived  the 
plan  of  writing  epistles  himself  under  the  name  of  Paul.  Once 
resolved  on  this,  prudence  counselled  him  at  least  not  to  be 
intentionally  sparing  of  reminiscences  from  these  epistles. 
Parallels  like  those  afforded  by  1.  Timothy  i.  8,  '  we  know  that 
the  law  is  good,'  and  Eomans  vii.  16,  or  by  1.  Timothy  i.  5, 

*  the  end  of  the  charge  is  love,'  and  Romans  xiii.  9,  or  more 
especially  by  1.  Timothy  ii.  7,  *  I  speak  the  truth,  I  lie  not,' 
and  Romans   ix.  1,  decidedly  give  us  the  impression  that 
1.  Timothy  is  dependent  upon  Romans,  since  what  is  admi- 
rably to  the  point  in  Romans  either  disturbs  the  context  here 
or  does  not  appear  to  have  sufficient  motive.     A  number  of 
verses  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles  sound  as  though  they  were  put 
together  from  genuine  Pauline  fragments 8 ;  and  if  1 .  Timothy 
i.  12-16  and  ii.  7  were  not  written  by  Paul  himself,  the  writer 
has  consciously  imitated  him,  and  has  caught  his  very  tone 
even  in  externals,  as  in  the  vTrsp  sTr^sovaasv  rj  xdpis. 

1  1.  Tim.  i.  11  and  2.  Cor.  iv.  4. 

3  i.  11.  3  i.  3.  4  i.  10.  *  iii.  16. 

6  v.  14.  7  v.  12. 

8  E.g.,  2.  Tim.  ii.  20  from  1.  Cor.  iii.  12  and  Bom.  ix.  21  ;  2.  Tim.  iv.  6 
from  Philip,  ii.  17,  i.  23,  and  2.  Tim.  iv.  7  fol.  from  1.  Cor.  ix.  24,  25,  Philip,  ii. 
16,  iii.  12,  14. 

x  2 


180       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

The  points  of  contact  between  the  Pastoral  Epistles  and  the 
other  books  of  the  New  Testament  are  not  so  numerous  as  to 
warrant  us  in  maintaining  that  the  relation  between  them  is 
that  of  dependence ;  they  are  related  to  1.  Peter,  as  they  are 
to  1.  Clement,  in  their  tone  and  phraseology,  but  a  literary 
obligation  need  not  necessarily  have  existed.  We  are  often 
reminded  in  them  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels  :  compare,  for 
instance,  1.  Timothy  ii.  6a  (6&ovs  savrov  avTi\vrpov  vTrsp 
with  Mark  x.  45  (Sovvcu  rrjv  ^jrv^rji'  avrov  \vrpov  avrl 
and  1.  Timothy  v.  18  with  Luke  x.  7  ;  here  the 
logion  '  The  labourer  is  worthy  of  his  hire  '  is  quoted  just  as 
it  stands  in  Luke  as  *  Scripture,'  immediately  after  the  words 
of  Deuteronomy  xxv.  4.  But  this  must  be  due  to  a  lapse 
of  memory  ;  at  the  time  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles  no  one  would 
have  treated  Luke  as  ypa^tj  in  the  same  way  as  Deuteronomy. 
The  author  of  1.  Timothy  believed  that  this  was  a  saying  from 
the  Old  Testament  such  as  that  taken  from  Deuteronomy  xxv., 
and  indeed  it  has  quite  the  Old  Testament  ring.  We  are  not 
sufficiently  familiar  with  the  early  history  of  the  Synoptics 
to  venture  to  assert  that  the  author  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles 
had  read  our  Gospels. 

(b)  The  external  evidence  is  not  favourable  to  the  authen- 
ticity of  the  Epistles.  The  earliest  certain  use  of  them  is  by 
Polycarp  of  Smyrna,  and  by  the  end  of  the  second  century 
we  find  them  everywhere  firmly  established  in  the  Corpus 
Paulinarum ;  but  no  more  is  proved  by  this  than  that  the 
Pastoral  Epistles  existed  in  the  first  half  of  the  second  century 
and  were  warmly  welcomed  by  the  Church.  It  might  be  mere 
chance  that  neither  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas  nor  Justin  contains 
the  slightest  reference  to  them  ;  certainly  they  share  this  fate 
with  other  Epistles  of  Paul  of  undoubted  authenticity.  But 
of  very  real  importance  is  the  fact  that  Marcion  the  Gnostic 
(about  140  A.D.)  did  not  include  them  in  his  Canon  of  Pauline 
Epistles,  although  he  certainly  admitted  into  it  all  writings 
which  he  had  heard  of  in  the  Church  under  Paul's  name  ; 
if,  then,  the  Pastoral -Epistles  belonged  to  these,  why  should 
he  have  utterly  ignored  them,  since  he  might  easily  have 
omitted  what  was  inconvenient  to  him  in  their  case  as  well 
as  in  that  of  the  other  Epistles?  The  reasons  by  which 


§  13.]  THE    PASTORAL    EPISTLES  181 

he  is  said  to  have  justified  their  exclusion  from  his  Canon, 
to  which  he  even  admitted  the  short  Epistle  to  Philemon, 
are  purely  fanciful.  But  if  Marcion  was  not  acquainted 
with  the  Pastoral  Epistles  at  that  time,  we  should  conclude 
that  they  did  not  make  their  appearance  until  a  period  when 
the  other  ten  were  already  enjoying  a  widespread  circula- 
tion :  in  all  probability  after  100.  This  of  course  is  not  a 
sufficient  proof  of  their  spuriousness,  but  it  makes  us  sus- 
picious of  the  tradition. 

(c)  The  first  of  the  main  arguments  against  their  authen- 
ticity is  afforded  by  their  language.     The  number  of  a?raf 

is  not  so  much  the  question,  for  that  words  like 
l  or  olfcovpyos  2  are  not  to  be  found  in  Paul's  writings 
proves  no  more  than  does  the  fact  that  6\oK\r)po?  and  oXoreXTJs- 
are  only  used  by  Paul  in  1.  Thessalonians.3  It  is  more  worthy 
of  notice  that  in  the  Pastoral  Epistles  such  everyday  words  as 
7rpo(7s^siv  TIVL,  apvsl&Oai  and  aifaXi/jLos  are  met  with  five,  six 
and  four  times  respectively,  but  never  in  Paul's  Epistles  nor 
in  the  rest  of  the  New  Testament ;  or  that  instead  of  the 
thoroughly  Pauline  s-mdv^ia  we  here  find  TjSoz^,4  sometimes 
compounded  with  fyiKos,  (^A»;8oz/ot,5  to  form  a  word  very  charac- 
teristic of  these  Epistles.  But  the  fact  that  brings  conviction 
is  that  many  words  which  were  indispensable  to  Paul  are 
absent  from  the  Pastoral  Epistles  :  e.g.  particles  like  apa,  S<,6, 
&IOTI  ;  whole  families  of  words  like  Trspia-o-os  with  all  its  com- 
pounds (elsewhere  only  absent  in  Philemon  and  2.  Thessa- 
lonians) ;  likewise  /cav^aa-Oat,  (elsewhere  occurring  everywhere 
but  in  Colossians  and  Philemon),  and,  still  more,  evepyslv. 
The  word  crw/ia,  which  Paul  uses  so  extremely  abundantly, 
only  appears  here  once  in  the  form  <Tcojj,aTiKij.G  On  the  other 
hand,  the  Pastoral  Epistles  make  the  most  liberal  use  of  the 
words  o-ci)<f>pa)V,<TW<f)p6vw$,cra><l)poveiv,  o-w^povu^SLv^o-w^povio-^os 
and  o-toxfrpocrvvrj,  whereas  with  Paul  a-wfypovslv  alone  occurs 
but  twice.  Still  more  striking  is  the  preference  for  the  stem 

in  all  sorts  of  combinations  and  derivatives — even 
os,  which  occurs  only  in  1.  and  2.  Timothy  7  in  the 

1  1.  Tim.  ii.  9.  2  Titus  ii.  5.  3  v.  23. 

4  Titus  iii.  3.  »  2.  Tim.  iii.  4.  •  1.  Tim.  iv.  8. 

7  1.  Tim.  iii.  2    2.  Tim.  ii.  24. 


182       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

whole  of  the  New  Testament — while  the  words  svcrs^ws, 
svo-efieia,  svas^slv  may  be  found  thirteen  times  here  and  not 
once  in  Paul's  Epistles.  Nor  can  it  be  accidental  that  ica\6$ 
may  be  met  with  twenty-four  times  in  the  Pastoral  Epistles 
alone  and  only  sixteen  times  in  the  ten  Pauline  Epistles  ; 
and  while  Paul  uses  it  almost  exclusively  as  a  substantive — 
TO  fca\6v,  tca\,d,  ica\6v  SCTTLV — it  occurs  twenty  times  as  an 
adjective  in  the  Pastoral  Epistles,  especially  with  epya.1 

But  neither  does  the  style  in  general  remind  us  in 
the  least  of  Paul,  whether  we  compare  it  with  Ephesians, 
or  1.  Thessalonians,  or  Eomans.  The  constructions  are 
simple,  the  ideas  expressed  without  ornament  (for  word- 
plays like  (f>L\tj^ovoi  iia\\ov  r)  <f>i\60eoi,*  can  scarcely  be 
classed  as  ornaments)  ;  nowhere  is  there  a  trace  of  the 
Pauline  swing  and  energy,  and  we  hardly  ever  come  across 
an  anacoluthon,  a  break  in  the  construction,  or  an  ambiguity 
caused  by  the  rush  of  hurrying  ideas :  all  is  regular  and 
smooth  in  the  Pastoral  Epistles,  but  all  is  also  without  force 
or  colour.  Their  words  are  many  and  their  ideas  few ;  of 
Paul  one  might  say  exactly  the  opposite. 

Attempts  have  been  made  to  weaken  this  argument  by 
reminding  us  that  what  we  have  here  are  private  letters, 
in  which  the  writer  would  naturally  express  himself  with  less 
restraint  than  he  would  in  what  might  be  called  an  official 
epistle — a  letter  addressed  to  a  community.  I  doubt,  however, 
whether  this  differentiation  would  apply  in  Paul's  case ;  he 
did  not  consider  himself  to  be  more  '  official '  in  his  Epistle 
to  the  Philippians  than  he  did  when  he  was  writing  to 
Philemon  or  to  his  friend  Timothy ;  but  even  if  it  were  so, 
nothing  would  be  gained  for  the  Pastoral  Epistles,  for  such  a 
difference  could  only  apply  to  the  tone  and  the  manner,  not  to 
the  very  materials  of  the  language.  Blass,  the  '  philologist,' 
does  not  consider  it  astonishing  '  that  Paul  should  write  to 
his  disciples  and  assistants  in  a  different  manner—  i.e.  in  a 
more  lofty  style — than  to  the  churches.'  Are  we  to  suppose, 
then,  that  Blass  himself  writes  letters  to  his  friends  and 
pupils  in  a  more  lofty  style  than  he  bestows  on  the  grammars, 
prefaces  and  historical  sketches  which  he  produces  for  the 

'  This  occurs  four  times  in  Titus  alone.  Tim.  iii.  4. 


§  13.]  THE    PASTORAL    EPISTLES  183 

common  herd  ?  And  in  what  sense  of  the  word  can  the  style 
of  1.  Timothy  be  considered  more  lofty  than,  for  instance, 
that  of  2.  Corinthians  8-5  ?  It  may  be  neater,  but  is  a 
neater  style  the  same  thing  as  a  more  lofty  one  ?  Still  more 
unfortunate,  perhaps,  is  the  suggestion  that  Paul's  style  might 
have  undergone  a  change,  that  as  he  grew  old  he  might  have 
lost  some  of  the  animation  once  peculiarly  his  own,  might 
have  been  influenced  by  many  things,  even  the  vocabulary  of 
his  opponents.  Surely  it  is  more  than  improbable  that  this 
influence  should  only  have  begun  to  exert  itself  so  late,  and 
should  have  extended  to  the  use  of  particles  and  whole  groups 
of  related  words  which  have  nothing  whatever  to  do  with 
theology.  Moreover,  Paul  was  an  old  man  when  he  wrote 
Philemon  and  Philippians,  yet  why  should  these  traces  of 
senility  be  absent  from  them  ?  And  who  can  believe  that 
Paul,  whom  we  have  studied  as  a  letter-writer  throughout  a 
whole  decade  and  have  always  found  substantially  the  same, 
should  suddenly  after  another  two  or  three  years  have  under- 
gone so  complete  a  change  ?  The  style  of  Ephesians  might 
perhaps  be  described  as  tinged  with  traces  of  senility  ;  but  to 
credit  Paul  with  a  change  of  style  from  that  of  Galatians  and 
Corinthians  through  the  more  wordy  obscurity  of  Colossians 
and  Ephesians  to  the  smooth  commonplace  of  the  Pastoral 
Epistles,  is  surely  a  little  too  much.  Let  writers  with  such 
theories  of  style-development  examine  the  earliest  and  latest 
works  of  Tertullian  or  Athanasius  from  that  point  of  view — of 
men  who  were  exposed  to  outside  influences  from  reading 
and  controversy  at  least  as  much  as  Paul — and  then  see 
whether  they  discover  such  differences  there  as  exist  between 
Romans  and  1.  Timothy ! 

(d)  As  to  an  intentional  appropriation  of  phrases  from 
the  enemy's  camp,  this  would  be  least  incredible  in  the 
case  of  formulae  bearing  on  a  different  world  of  thought : 
as  when  the  Pastorals  so  frequently  speak  of  the  good  or 
the  dean  conscience  (expressions  which  do  not  occur  in  Paul's 
Epistles),  or  when  stress  is  laid  upon  the  sound  word  of 
doctrine  (vyirjs  or  v^iaivav),  again  without  parallel  in  Paul. 
Expressions  like  \oyofjLa^slv l  or  Xo^/o^a^lat 2  might,  of 

1  2.  Tim.  ii.  14.  2  1.  Tim.  vi.  4. 


184       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

course,  have  been  coined  by  Paul  at  any  moment  for  use 
against  a  particular  form  of  theological  propaganda.  But  what 
could  have  induced  the  Apostle  absolutely  to  discard  the 
words  most  characteristic  of  his  thought,  i.e.  his  favourite 
ideas,  like  that  of  'putting  on '  (Christ,  or  the '  new  man,'  etc.) 
or  of  *  revelation  '  (ctiroK&kv^is  and  aTroKa\v7TT£iv}  ?  And  are 
we  to  suppose  that  Paul  further  owed  to  his  adversaries  his 
unusual  use  of  TTIO-TIS  (faith)  ?  For  the  words  h  Trlcrrsi,  are 
met  with  here  nine  times  in  the  most  varied  connections,1 
while  in  the  other  ten  Epistles  they  occur  but  thrice,  and 
even  then  only  coupled  with  the  verbs  £?}z/,  slvai  and  O-T^KSLV. 
These  things  alone  could  only  be  explained  on  the  assumption 
that  the  writer  was  a  man  whose  ways  of  thought  were  other 
than  Paul's  ;  but  the  fundamental  conceptions  and  the  whole 
attitude  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles  are  different  from  those  of 
Paul.  I  do  not  mean  that  importance  should  be  attached 
to  small  contradictions,  such  as  that  a  mediator  should 
be  spoken  of  in  Galatians  2  as  something  of  a  relatively  low 
order,  while  in  1.  Timothy  3  Christ  is  solemnly  extolled  as 
*  mediator  between  God  and  men,'  nor  can  there  be  any 
question  here  of  a  peculiar  non-Pauline  theology  like  that  of 
Hebrews.  The  author  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles  was  certainly 
not  conscious  of  deviating  in  the  smallest  particular  from  his 
revered  Apostle,  and  innovations  in  doctrine,  as  we  know,  he 
hated  with  all  his  soul. 

But  in  this  dread  of  theological  contention,  and  even  of 
speculation  of  any  kind,4  in  this  accentuation  of  a  simple 
holding  fast  and  propagation  of  the  tradition,5  in  the  striking 
emphasis  laid  upon  the  practical  duties  of  Christians  and  in 
the  moralising  character  of  our  Epistles,  a  different  spirit  is 
shown  from  that  of  Paul — the  spirit  of  the  After  born.  Faith, 
of  which  he  cannot  speak  often  enough,  has  changed  to  ortho- 
doxy ;  it  now  means  the  recognition  of  and  unswerving  ad- 
herence to  fundamental  religious  facts,  such  as  that  of  the 
unity  of  God,6  the  universality  of  the  divine  decree  of  mercy,7 

1  E.g.,  1.  Tim.  i.  4,  '  the  dispensation  of  God  which  is  in  faith.' 

2  iii.  19  fol.  J  ii.  5. 

4  2.  Tim.  ii.  23,  and  1.  Tim.  vi.  4.     5  E.g.,  2.  Tim.  i.  13  fol.,  and  ii.  2. 
•  1,  ii.^T  T       ii.  4,  6. 


§  13.]  Till:    PASTORAL    EPISTLES  185 

the  fulfilment  of  the  same  through  Jesus  Christ,  whose 
mortal  nature  is  just  as  strongly  dwelt  upon  as  his  subsequent 
glorification,1  and  the  equal  balance  of  labour  and  reward. J 
It  is  true  that  we  still  hear  of  a  calling,3  of  the  elect,4  of 
the  Divine  purpose  and  grace  (jrpoOso-is  KOI  X"PLy)  which 
was  given  us  from  everlasting  in  Christ  Jesus f)  as  the  only 
ground  of  our  salvation  (ov  Kara  ra  epya  rm&v)  ;  but  who 
could  extract  from  these  bald  formulae  anything  of  the  daunt- 
less force  of  the  belief  in  Predestination  which  is  to  be  found 
in  Komans  viii.  28  fol.  ?  According  to  the  Pastoral  Epistles, 
salvation  is  fore-ordained  to  the  believers,  the  righteous,  the 
pure.  According  to  Paul,  the  individual  believers  are  fore- 
ordained to  salvation.  The  Anti- Judaism  of  Paul,  which 
was  wholly  a  matter  of  principle,  has  here  become  one  of 
persons.  In  Titus  i.  10  ol  SK  rijs  Tr^pro//,?}?,  '  they  of  the 
circumcision,'  are  treated  as  contemptuously  as  are  their 
prescriptions  for  purification — founded  nevertheless  on  the 
law  of  Moses — which  are  called  '  Jewish  fables  and  command- 
ments of  men.'  This  was  the  judgment  of  the  early  Catholic 
Church,  but  not  of  Paul.  In  the  Pastoral  Epistles  we  find  a 
uniform  reflection  of  the  average  Christianity  of  the  second 
century,  although  one  peculiarly  rich  in  reminiscences  of 
Pauline  doctrine ;  even  the  Creed  appears  already  fixed  in 
definite  formulae,0  and  it  is  assumed  as  a  matter  of  course 
that  each  baptised  Christian  has  testified  to  his  faith  before 
the  community,  in  the  recognised  form. 

But  most  instructive  of  all  will  be  a  glance  at  the  eschato- 
logy  of  the  Epistles.  The  true  Paul  allowed  his  ideas  about 
the  Last  Things  to  vary  a  good  deal,  but  still  a  conviction  of 
the  near  approach  of  the  Last  Day  was  always  a  mighty  force 
within  him,  and  the  hope  that  he  might  himself  live  to  see 
the  return  of  the  Lord  never  wholly  left  him.  The  thought 
that  it  might  be  necessary  to  make  lasting  provision  for  a 
continued  existence  of  the  Church  on  earth,  would  have  been 
inconceivable  to  him.  But  in  the  Pastoral  Epistles  the  situa- 
tion is  completely  changed.  The  presentiment  of  death  in 
2.  Tim.  iv.  6  may  here  be  left  out  of  account.  Men  were 

1  1,  Hi.  16.  2  2,  ii.  5  fol.  3  2.  Tim.  i.    .  4  2.  Tim.  ii.  10. 

5  2.  Tim.  i.  9.       6  1.  Tim.  ii.  5  fol.,  iii.  16,  vi.  13  ;  2.  Tim.  ii.  8. 


186        AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

waiting,  it  is  true,  for  the  appearance  of  Jesus  and  the  Day 
of  Judgment ;  when,  indeed,  did  they  cease  to  wait  for  them  ? 
But  they  were  already  consoling  themselves  with  the  thought 
that  the  Parusia  of  God  would  take  place  '  in  his  own  time,'  l 
and  they  were  accordingly  preparing  to  establish  themselves 
upon  earth.  The  principal  object,  as  we  know,  of  the  Pastoral 
Epistles  is  to  give  advice  on  the  practical  organisation  of 
the  Church,  and  a  second  period  in  the  history  of  the  com- 
munity— a  period  subsequent  to  the  Apostolic — is  brought 
clearly  into  view.  The  passages  beginning  '  the  time  will 
come  when,' 2  *  in  the  last  days  grievous  times  shall  come,' 3 
*  in  later  times  some  shall  fall  away,' 4  are  instances 
of  this,  while  1.  ii.  15  is  also  specially  characteristic. 
The  fact  that  this  future  tense  alternates  with  the  pre- 
sent of  Titus  i.  10,  '  there  are  many  unruly  men,'  and  the 
past  of  1.  Timothy  i.  6,  'from  which  things  some  have 
turned  aside,' 5  is  only  a  proof  that  the  writer  found  him- 
self in  an  artificial  position  ;  the  things  which  he  makes  the 
lips  of  Paul  foretell  as  future  were  to  him  partly  present  and 
partly  past,  and  it  is  clear  throughout  that  he  was  riot  count- 
ing upon  a  speedy  and  sudden  intervention  of  God.  How 
much  more  primitive,  more  Pauline,  is  the  tone  of  Hebrews, 
with  its  anxiety  lest  the  short  respite,  '  so  long  as  it  is  called 
To-day,'  should  be  let  slip ! 

(e)  A  further  reason  for  disputing  the  authenticity  of  the 
Pastoral  Epistles  lies  in  the  fact  that  the  manner  in  which 
Paul  here  speaks  of  himself  to  his  trusted  friends,  and 
even  the  motives  which  led  him  to  write  to  them,  are 
psychologically  inconceivable.  In  Galatians  and  1.  and  2. 
Corinthians  we  have  sufficient  evidence  of  how  close  were  his 
relations  with  Titus  and  Timothy,  what  great  things  he 
expected  of  them  and  they  did  not  fail  to  accomplish.  Are 
we  to  believe,  then,  that  in  writing  to  these  men  he  would 
style  himself  with  full  formality  in  the  addresses  as  *  an 
Apostle  of  Jesus  Christ/  etc.  etc.,  exactly  as  he  did  towards  the 
Romans  whom  he  did  not  personally  know,  or  the  Galatians 
when  they  were  leaning  towards  apostasy,  while  in  the 


1  1.  Tim.  vi.  15. 
4  1.  Tim.  iv.  1. 


*  2.  Tim.  iv.  3. 
•s  Cf.  1.  vi.  21. 


8  2.  Tim.  iii.  1  fol. 


§  13.]  THE    PASTORAL   EPISTLES  187 

Epistle  to  Philemon  he  did  not  consider  it  necessary  ?  Must 
he  declare  to  them  that  he  was  appointed  of  God  to  be  a 
preacher  of  the  Gospel,  that  he  spoke  the  truth  and  lied  not  ? 
Must  he  discourse  to  them  at  considerable  length  upon  his 
past  career,  with  exaggerations  towards  both  extremes, 
representing  himself  on  the  one  hand  as  having  been  a  man 
of  shame,  '  the  chief  of  sinners,'  and  on  the  other  as  having 
'  served  God  from  his  forefathers  in  a  pure  conscience '  ? 
We  need  not  emphasise  the  contradiction  between  this  last 
sentence  and  the  seventh  chapter  of  Romans  ;  but  will  the  self- 
praise  of  the  Apostle  in  Philippians  iii.  6 — which  is  yet 
intended  merely  as  a  foil  to  iii.  8,  *  I  do  count  them  but 
dung'1 — bear  comparison  with  this  unqualified  \arpeva)? 
We  are  shown  in  Philippians  iii.  12  what  Paul  thought  of  his 
perfection,  of  his  so-called  completeness :  in  2.  Timothy  iv.  7 
fol.  we  see  an  estimate  of  his  merits  such  as  could  only  have 
been  pronounced  by  a  disciple  who  deeply  honoured  him — not 
by  himself.  Nor  does  he  seem  to  have  had  any  very  con- 
siderable confidence  in  his  intimate  friends,  since  he  explains 
the  most  elementary  things  to  them  at  such  length,  impresses 
upon  them  over  and  over  again  the  most  obvious  duties,  such 
as  that  of  decent  conduct,2  and  considers  it  natural  that 
Timothy  should  be  thought  lightly  of  on  account  of  his  youth, 
whereas  he  was  certainly  older  at  the  time  than  was  Jesus  at  his 
death  or  Paul  at  the  beginning  of  his  missionary  work.  As  in 
the  phrase  /jLrjSslsTijs  VSOTTJTOS  aov  fcaTatypoveiTO),  so  throughout 
the  Pastoral  Epistles,  we  have  the  impression  that  the  world 
at  large  is  being  addressed,  not  the  addressees  :  this,  however, 
does  not  appear  to  strike  those  critics  who  point  to  this 
passage  with  such  enthusiasm  as  evidence  of  the  private 
character  of  the  Epistles. 

Zahn,  on  the  other  hand,  exaggerates  the  unpleasant 
features  in  the  picture  of  Timothy,  who,  he  declares,  is  already 
tempted  to  withdraw  in  a  cowardly  way  from  Paul,  and 
therefore  from  his  own  calling  ;  who  '  shelters  himself  behind 
his  youth  '  to  excuse  his  lack  of  energy  in  the  fulfilment  of 
his  duties.  He  also  urges  upon  us,  and  with  justice,  that 
*  all  the  legendary  invention  of  the  Ancient  Church  was  on 

1  Philip,  iii.  8.  *  E.g.,  2  Tim.  ii.  22  :  '  Flee  youthful  lusts.' 


188        AN    INTRODUCTION"    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

the  side  of  panegyric,'  and  from  this  he  deduces  the  folly  of 
the  hypothesis  that  a  pseudo-Paul  should  in  1.  and  2.  Timothy 
have  made  this  caricature  of  the  Timothy  whom  the  genuine 
Paul  praised  so  highly  in  his  Epistles.  But  the  pseudo- 
Paul's  need  for  panegyric  is  amply  satisfied  in  the  words 
of  praise  devoted  to  Paul  himself,1  and  even  in  the  case  of 
Timothy  it  obtains  its  due  in  vv.  i.  4  fol.  and  iii.  10  of  the 
Second  Epistle.  The  unpleasing  traits  in  the  picture  of 
Timothy  and  Titus  are  demanded  by  the  parts  assigned  to 
them,  for  the  detailed  instructions  which  the  author  pretends 
to  possess  from  Apostolic  lips  would  only  have  been  needed 
by  men  who  were  not  yet  quite  familiar  with  their  task. 
Again,  the  number  of  his  friends  who  have  fallen  away  and 
turned  traitors  serves,  on  the  one  hand,  to  make  the  lonely 
greatness  of  the  Apostle,  still  unforsaken  by  his  God,  shine 
forth  with  yet  purer  glory  ;  and,  on  the  other,  it  provides  a 
motive  for  the  lively  anxiety  with  which  he  gives  advice  and 
warnings  of  so  minute  and  pressing  a  nature.  But,  not  least, 
we  find  in  it  a  reflection  of  the  experiences  of  the  unknown 
author  himself :  the  untrustworthiness,  the  weakmindedness, 
the  lack  of  clearness  of  those  who  wished  to  be  leaders  and 
examples,  appeared  to  him  as  the  canker  gnawing  at  the  roots 
of  the  Christianity  of  his  times.  Hebrews  fully  prepares  us 
for  such  judgments  in  a  Christian  writing  twenty  years  later. 
But  can  we  believe  that  the  men  who  helped  Paul  and  his 
Gospel  to  conquer  the  world,  who  restored  his  authority  in 
communities  of  which  he  almost  despaired,  and  who  did  not 
hesitate  to  risk  their  necks  for  his  life — such  men  as  Titus, 
Timothy,  Aquila,  or  Demas — can  we  believe  that  these  were 
such  miserably  timid,  self-seeking  and  small-minded  men  as 
Zahn  would  have  us  to  think,  in  order  that  he  may  save  the 
genuineness  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles  ?  We  must  judge  Paul  by 
his  disciples,  for  he  had  had  ten  years  in  which  to  train  them ; 
if  they  were  so  immature  as  would  appear  from  the  Pastoral 
Epistles,  he  certainly  had  not  finished  his  course  of  instruction  ! 
Moreover,  if  Paul  had  been  with  both  Timothy  and  Titus 
shortly  before  writing  1.  Timothy  and  Titus  respectively2 
and  had  then  appointed  them  their  tasks,  why  should  he  do  so 

1  E.g.,  2.  Tim.  iii.  10  fol.  »  1.  Tim.  i.  3  ;  Titus  i.  5. 


§  13.]  THE    PASTORAL    EPISTLES  ISO 

again  so  soon,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  he  was  looking  forward 
to  a  speedy  re-union  with  them  ?  '  1.  Tim.  iii.  15  shows  that 
the  writer  himself  felt  how  unnatural  this  was,  though  he  was 
unable  to  avoid  it.  Why  is  there  not  in  1.  Timothy  a  single 
word  of  advice  specially  intended  for  Ephesus,  with  which 
Paul  was  so  intimately  acquainted,  and  why  does  he  give 
Titus  so  detailed  a  picture  of  the  Cretan  heretics,  whom  the 
latter  must  surely  have  known  best  himself,  while  at  the 
same  moment  destroying  the  possible  utility  of  the  infor- 
mation by  bidding  him  leave  Crete?  Contradictory  things 
of  this  sort  will  never  be  explained  on  the  supposition  that 
the  real  Paul  was  writing  to  real  fellow-labourers  about  the 
real  circumstances  of  his  time,  but  only  by  assuming  that  a 
later  writer  had  created  an  artificial  situation  out  of  which 
he  made  the  Apostle  issue  directions  to  certain  famous 
community-leaders  of  former  times.  It  is  also  significant  to 
note  that  he  can  only  picture  the  companions  of  Paul  as 
chattels  always  at  the  disposal  of  the  Apostolic  Prince  of 
the  Church,  a  band  from  among  whom  the  latter  regularly 
appointed  the  leaders,  the  important  personages,  the  Apostolic 
vicars,  of  the  newly  founded  communities. 

(/)  Similar  difficulties  arise  when  we  attempt  to  find  a 
place  for  the  Epistles  during  the  life  of  Paul— especially  since, 
considering  their  close  connection,  only  one  period  of  Paul's 
life  is  possible,  and  that  after  the  composition  of  the  other 
Epistles.  Let  us  see  what  they  themselves  have  to  tell  us  as 
to  the  circumstances  under  which  they  were  written. 

According  to  1.  Timothy  i.  3,  Paul  had  recently  been 
working  together  with  Timothy  at  Ephesus,  but  had  now, 
leaving  the  latter  behind  to  contend  against  the  false  brethren, 
gone  on  to  Macedonia,  in  the  confident  hope  of  a  speedy 
return.2  From  this  we  conclude  that  the  Apostle  was  a  free 
man,  and  we  might  be  inclined  to  think  of  the  particular 
moment  in  the  so-called  Third  Missionary  Journey  when 
after  a  three  years'  sojourn  in  Ephesus  he  was  forced  to 
leave  the  city  and  went  up  through  Troas  to  Macedonia,  were 
it  not,  unfortunately,  that  according  to  2.  Corinthians  this 
was  done  in  company  with  Timothy  and  certainly  not  in  the 

1  1.  Tim.  iii.  14  ;  Titus  iii.  12.  2  1.  Tim.  iii.  14  and  iv.  13. 


190       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  IT. 

hope  of  a  speedy  return.  The  Epistle  to  Titus  Paul  also 
wrote  as  a  free  man,  surrounded  by  many  companions  l ;  he 
had  recently  been  with  Titus  in  Crete,  and  had  left  him 
behind  to  organise  the  new  communities  ;  but  now  he  writes 
to  him  to  come  with  all  speed,  as  soon  as  Artemas  or  Tychicus 
should  have  arrived,  to  Nicopolis  (probably  in  Epirus),  where 
he  was  intending  to  pass  the  winter.2  The  temper  alone  of 

1.  Timothy  is  sufficient  to  show  that  it  could  not  have  been 
composed  immediately  after  the  Ephesian  catastrophe.     It 
might   rather  be  assigned  to  an  excursion  which — with  as 
much  probability  as  that  second  journey  to   Corinth 3  also 
not  mentioned  in  the  Acts — Paul  might  have  made  a  year 
or  two  before  from  Ephesus  to  Macedonia.     But  then  the 
Epistle  would  have  to  be  placed  before  2.  Cor.  and  Eomans 
and  to  be  divided  by  a  long  interval  from  2.  Timothy,  and 
this  is  impossible.     Paul   might   certainly   have  planned  a 
winter  in  Nicopolis  during  his  last  journey  through  Macedonia 
—possibly  before  he  had  received  tidings  as  to  the  effect  of 

2.  Cor. — though,  of  course,  the  execution  of  the  plan  need  not 
be  taken  for  granted  ;   but   that  does  not  help  us  with  the 
Epistle  to  Titus,  because  Paul  touched  at  Crete  for  the  first 
time  considerably  later,  during  his  journey  to  Eome.     If  this 
had  ever  been  preceded  by  a  fruitful  activity  upon  the  island, 
the  eye-witness  who  wrote  the  report  beginning  at  Acts  xxvii.  7 
would  certainly  have  mentioned  it.   And  moreover  the  bringing 
in  of  several  otherwise  unattested  acts  is  in  itself  suspicious. 

In  2.  Timothy  we  find  that  Paul  is  a  prisoner  in  Kome,4 
conscious,  according  to  iv.  6-8,  that  he  is  nearing  his  end. 
In  iv.  16  he  says  that  '  at  his  first  defence  all  had  forsaken 
him  '  ;  the  impudent  opposition  of  Alexander  the  copper- 
smith, too,  had  since  then  offended  him  deeply  (iv.  14) ;  all 
that  were  in  Asia  had  turned  away  from  him  (i.  15).  But 
he  had  in  the  mean  time  received  much  loving-kindness ; 
the  fugitives,  with  the  exception  of  Demas/  seem  to  have 
returned  to  him  for  a  time,  but  just  now  only  Luke 
was  with  him/'  while  Titus  was  in  Dalmatia  and  Crescens 
in  Gaul.  Paul  wishes 7  to  have  Timothy,  as  well  as 


1  Hi.  I'.. 
4  i.  1C  fol. 


«  iii.  12. 
*  iv.  10. 


'  See  pp.  92-94. 
6  iv.  11.  7  i.  4. 


§  13.]  THE    PASTORAL    EPISTLES  191 

Mark,1  with  him  shortly,'2  before  the  winter  had  set  in.3 
Where  Timothy  was  staying  at  the  time  we  are  not  definitely 
told,  but  it  could  not  very  well  have  been  far  from  Troas, 
since  he  was  to  bring  with  him  thence  the  famous  cloak  and 
books  (and  this  to  one  who  was  daily  expecting  his  end  ! ) 4 ;  in 
fact,  in  spite  of  the  words  *  Tychicus  I  sent  unto  Ephesus  '•"' 
and  of  verse  i.  15,  our  thoughts  would,  according  to  i.  18  and 
iv.  19,  and  as  in  1.  Timothy,  turn  to  Ephesus.  Zahn  prefers 
Iconium  or  Lystra — a  holiday  resort  of  the  evangelist, 
who  had  grown  weary  at  home.  The  Epistle  might  quite 
well  have  been  written  during  the  Koman  imprisonment,  but 
in  that  case  before  Philemon,  Colossians  and  Philippians,  for 
when  they  were  composed  Timothy  and  Mark  were  both  with 
Paul  and  had  been  sharing  his  sufferings  for  some  time. 
Above  all,  it  is  evident  that  Timothy  here  receives  accurate 
information  for  the  first  time  concerning  Paul's  imprison- 
ment. But  here  again  it  is  strange  that  Paul  should  calmly 
have  left  the  cloak  in  Troas  for  several  years,  especially  if, 
with  the  Acts,  we  assign  the  duration  of  the  Caesarean 
imprisonment  to  two  years  ;  while  the  remarks  of  iv.  20,  that 
Erastus  had  remained  at  Corinth  and  Trophimus  had  been 
left  behind  at  Miletus  sick,  sound  more  than  ever  as  though 
this  had  taken  place  quite  recently,  in  fact  during  the  last 
Collection -journey,  in  which  Trophimus,  according  to  Acts  xx. 
4,  had  taken  part.  Timothy,  however,  had  also  taken  part  in 
it,  so  what  would  be  the  object  of  describing  these  proceedings 
to  him  over  again  ? 

The  career  of  Tychicus,  too,  becomes  an  absolute 
riddle.  Not  only  do  we  find  that  before  Paul's  arrest  the 
latter  had  sent  him  to  Crete — or  intended  to  do  so G — and  had 
then  taken  him  with  him  to  Jerusalem,7  but  that  after  his 
imprisonment  he  sent  him  according  to  2.  Timothy 8  to  Ephesus, 
and  according  to  Colossians  °  and  Ephesians  1()  to  Colossae  and 
other  neighbouring  communities.  But  these  two,  in  spite  of  the 
proximity  of  their  destinations,  are  incompatible  as  one  and 
the  same  mission,  since  in  the  one  case  Paul  was  almost 

1  iv.  11.  «  iv.  9.  :(  iv.  21.  4  iv.  13. 

*  iv.  1'2.  6  Tit.  iii.  12.  ~  Acts  xx.  4.  *  iv.  12. 

•  iv.  7.  '"  vi.  21. 


192       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

deserted  and  longed  for  the  arrival  of  Timothy,  and  in  the 
other  both  Timothy  and  several  other  companions  were  at 
his  side.  Even  if  we  allow  that  Philemon,  Colossians  and 
Ephesians  were  written  from  Caesarea,  this  would  mean  that 
Tychicus  had  for  years  been  travelling  about  unceasingly  at 
Paul's  behest ! 

In  order  to  avoid  these  difficulties  and  to  keep  the  Epistles 
close  together,  a  convenient  hypothesis  has  been  put  forward. 
It  creates  a  period  in  the  life  of  Paul  of  which  we  have  no 
other  knowledge  whatever — none,  therefore,  which  would 
interfere  with  the  utterances  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles — a 
period  which  may  equally  well  include  free  activity  in 
Ephesus  and  Epirus,  Macedonia  and  Crete,  and  close  confine- 
ment with  the  prospect  of  death.  For  such  a  period  the  only 
place  left  in  the  life  of  Paul  would  be  after  those  two  years 
which  he  spent  in  Eome  in  a  state  of  semi-confinement l  ;  he 
must  then  have  been  set  free,  but  after  a  short  time  have 
been  imprisoned  in  Eome  once  more,  and  then,  but  not  till  then, 
have  been  executed.  Of  the  objections  which  the  course  herein 
assumed  by  the  argument  raises  in  the  highest  degree — of  the 
importance  of  the  fact  that  the  Acts  certainly  knew  of  no  libera- 
tion of  the  Apostle,  and  of  the  lack  of  trustworthy  evidence  for 
this  so-called  second  Roman  imprisonment — it  is  unnecessary 
to  speak  further.2 

But  in  no  case  can  2.  Timothy  iv.  16-18  serve  as  a  founda- 
tion for  this  castle  in  the  air.  From  the  words  of  the  text  no 
one  would  guess  that  the  '  first  defence '  signifies  the  same 
thing  as  the  first  imprisonment,  or  that  the  delivery  out 
of  the  mouth  of  the  lion  was  identical  with  an  acquittal  by 
the  imperial  tribunal.  We  are  compelled  to  conceive  this 
triumph  of  the  Apostle  as  a  moral  and  religious  one,  both  from 
the  statement  of  its  end  and  aim  in  verse  17  and  the  parallel 
passage  in  verse  18,  '  The  Lord  will  deliver  me  from  every 
evil  work,  and  will  save  me  unto  his  heavenly  kingdom.' 
Paul  can  assure  his  pupil  that,  when  before  the  tribunal, 
he  had  defended  the  Gospel  with  power  and  had  as  yet 
checkmated  the  Devil,  although  relying  only  on  himself  and 
on  his  God.  The  second  imprisonment  theory  owes  its 

1  Acts  xxviii.  30.  2  See  pp.  42  fol. 


§  18.]  THE    PASTORAL    EPISTLES  193 

popularity  solely  to  the  unpopularity  of  any  critical  verdict 
against  the  authenticity  of  a  New  Testament  Book. 

Professor  Weiss  has  formulated  the  state  of  the  case  in 
the  following  way :  (a)  that  the  hypothesis  of  a  second 
imprisonment  is  confirmed  only  by  the  Pastoral  Epistles, 
if  they  are  genuine,  and  (b)  that  the  genuineness  of  the 
Pastoral  Epistles  can  only  be  proved  by  adopting  that 
hypothesis.  Criticism,  he  declared,  could  never  get  out  of 
this  circle.  In  this  statement  he  forgets,  however,  that  this 
'  in  itself  quite  conceivable  period  '  in  the  life  of  Paul  becomes 
very  improbable  in  the  light  of  our  tradition — for  that  a 
thing  is  conceivable  in  itself  is  never  of  much  use  to  us  in 
history, — that  such  suppositions  must  simply  be  neglected 
when  they  are  only  made  for  the  benefit  of  those  who  insist 
upon  holding  the  untenable  through  thick  and  thin,  and 
that  even  if  the  life  of  Paul  had  finally  shaped  itself  in  this 
way  beyond  question,  as  we  should  be  obliged  to  assume  if 
we  adopted  this  hypothesis  concerning  our  Epistles,  their 
authenticity  would  not  even  then  be  demonstrated,  since  with 
the  chronological  difficulties  the  apologists  would  only  have 
got  rid  of  a  quarter  or  an  eighth  part  of  the  objections  against 
their  genuineness. 

4.  With  regard  to  the  determination  of  the  date  of  the 
Epistles,  it  is  enough  to  refer  to  a  few  points,  though  these 
are  decisive.  As  we  refrained,  for  reasons  given  above,1  from 
drawing  conclusions  from  1.  Timothy  v.  18,  where  Luke  is 
apparently  considered  as  a  canonical  book,  so  we  will  also 
refrain  here  from  making  the  words  'antitheses  of  the 
knowledge  which  is  falsely  so  called ' 2  refer  to  Marcion's 
principal  work,  entitled  '  Antitheses,'  which  can  scarcely  have 
been  completed  before  the  year  140.  The  readers  of  these 
words  are  not  warned  against  any  book.  The  Church  appears 
to  be  going  through  a  period  of  persecution 3 ;  this  would 
explain  the  numerous  defections,  but  the  very  uncertain  indi- 
cations of  the  Epistles  do  not  permit  us  to  fix  the  date  of  this 
persecution  more  nearly  than  to  say  that  it  was  perhaps  that 
inaugurated  by  Trajan.  Certainly  the  condition  and  organi- 

1  See  p.  180.  *  1.  Tim.  vi.  20. 

3  See  2.  Tim.  i.  6  fol.,  iv.  5. 


194       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

sation  of  the  communities  presupposed  by  the  Epistles  point  to 
a  time  tolerably  far  removed  from  Paul.  Unfeigned  faith  has 
already  become  a  kind  of  family  inheritance  ;  Timothy  had 
received  '  it  from  his  mother  and  grandmother.2  The  duty  of 
keeping  the  faith  is  much  more  strongly  dwelt  upon  than 
that  of  spreading  and  deepening  it.  The  Catholic  stand- 
point is  reached  ;  the  truth  is  there,  and  men  are  divided 
into  those  who  hold  fast  to  the  truth  and  those  who  deny  it ; 
there  is  no  longer  any  question  of  more  or  less  in  the  recognition 
of  it  (Philip,  iii.  15) ;  there  is  hardly  a  sign  left  to  show  that 
the  religious  needs  of  the  communities  were  supplied,  as  in 
1.  Corinthians  xii.-xiv.,  by  their  spiritually  gifted  members  "' ; 
definite  persons  in  definite  offices  have  taken  the  place  of  the 
inspired  brethren,  and  the  division  into  clergy  and  laity,  even 
though  the  names  have  not  yet  appeared,  is  already  accom- 
plished.4 Particular  qualities  are  required  for  admission  into 
the  presbytery  and  for  the  offices  of  bishop  and  deacon,  as 
well  as  for  the  rank  of  honourable  widowhood.  These  quali- 
ties (e.g.  that  a  man  should  rule  well  his  own  house,  should 
not  be  a  newly  baptised  convert)  generally  show  that  they 
were  the  outcome  of  long  experience  and  observation,  and 
that  a  higher  standard  of  morality  was  already  required  from 
the  clergy.  It  is  just  as  certain  that  the  demand  of  1.  Tim.  iii.  2, 
that  a  bishop — and  also  a  deacon  (iii.  12) — should  be  the 
'  husband  of  one  wife,'  means  more  than  that  he  should  be 
free  from  the  reproach  of  adultery  and  fornication,  as  that 
the  '  widow  of  sixty  years  '  who  must  have  been  the  wife  of 
one  man  means,  especially  when  taken  in  conjunction  with 
v.  11,  a  woman  who  has  only  been  once  married :  the  second 
marriage  of  a  widow  was  already  counted  as  a  breach 
of  the  first  troth.  The  primitive  form  of  ordination  as  a 
means  of  special  grace  to  those  in  office  is  already  introduced 5 
—in  fact  great  store  is  set  upon  the  observance  in  the  Church 
of  definite  forms. 

The  picture  of  the  average  moral  condition  of  the  com- 
munities is  not  very  edifying,"  and  the  frequent  reference  to 

'  2.  Tim.  i.  5.  2  2,  i.  3  ;  1,  v.  4. 

1  1.  Tim.  iv.  14,  and  i.  18.  4  1.  Tim.  v.  17-19. 

•  1.  Tim.  iv.  14.     a  1.  Tim.  iii.  2-5,  8,  11,  v.  20  ;  2.  Tim.  iii.  2-5  and  6  fc 


§  13.]  'HIE    PASTORAL   EPISTLES  195 

the  opinion  of  non-Christians l  is  also  distinctive.  The  best 
spirits  in  the  Christian  world  saw  with  sorrow  that  the  vice 
and  frivolity  of  their  fellow-believers  were  doing  most  serious 
harm  to  the  Gospel ;  the  secularisation  of  Christianity  was 
proceeding  apace.  True,  this  did  not  begin  everywhere  at 
the  same  time,  nor  is  the  date  at  which  a  hierarchical 
organisation  first  came  into  being  distinctly  determinable,  but 
in  neither  case  can  we  take  our  stand  too  near  the  Apostolic 
Age. 

The  description  of  the  false  brethren  combated  in  the 
Pastoral  Epistles  agrees  with  this  assignment — namely,  to  the 
third  or  fourth  generation  A.D.  Even  if  there  were  no  direct 
mention  in  1.  Timothy  vi.  20  of  the  '  knowledge  which  is  falsely 
so  called,'  there  could  be  no  doubt  that  these  heretics — who,  in 
the  author's  experience,  had  already  caused  much  mischief 
in  the  Church,  and  from  whom  he  feared  still  more  —  were 
Gnostics.  Everything  in  the  writer's  theology  that  is  at  all 
tangible  is  anti-Gnostic  in  tone  ;  1.  Timothy  ii.  4  and  6  sound 
like  a  protest  against  the  Gnostic  division  of  mankind  into 
two  or  three  classes,  one  of  which,  that  of  the  slaves  of  Matter 
(Hylicists),  was  absolutely  excluded  from  salvation;  the  ex- 
travagant respect  for  tradition,  again,  and  the  anti-Docetic 
utterances  all  point  in  the  same  direction.  But  the  Gnostics 
may  be  recognised  still  more  distinctly  from  the  positive  infor- 
mation supplied  by  the  Pastoral  Epistles  as  to  the  behaviour 
of  the  heretics.  Whether  they  were  Greeks  or  quondam  Jews,2 
they  vaunted  themselves  upon  their  myths  of  subtle  meaning 
and  their  endless  genealogies,3  and  imposed  upon  men  by  their 
skill  in  reasoning  and  their  capacity  for  continually  setting 
up  and  solving  fresh  problems.  These  newfangled  teachers 
of  the  Law  used  it  for  idle  speculations,  instead  of  for 
the  confirmation  of  Christian  knowledge,1  or  appealed 
to  it  without  the  least  conception  of  its  true  interpreta- 
tion, in  order  to  enforce  the  commandments  of  men-5 — the 
prohibition  of  marriage,  of  the  drinking  of  wine  and 


1  1.  Tim.  iii.  7,  v.  14 ;  Titus  ii.  5.  -  Titus  i.  10  and  14. 

3  1.  Tim.  i.  4.  4  1.  Tim.  i.  7  ;  2,  iii.  15-17. 

*  Titus  i.  14. 

o  2 


196       AX    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

the  eating  of  meat ] — and  denied  the  idea  of  a  future 
resurrection  2  on  the  ground  that  the  true  resurrection  had 
already  taken  place,  at  any  rate  among  the  '  sons  of  know- 
ledge.' 

Now,  it  is  true  that  in  the  aggregate  these  features  do  not 
all  apply  to  any  single  Gnostic  system,  such  as  that  of 
Basilides  or  of  Marcion,  but  we  know  numerous  Gnostic  sys- 
tems only  by  name,  and  the  writer  has  no  desire  to  discuss 
the  individual  doctrines  of  any  one  system  minutely.  He 
confines  himself  in  dealing  with  this  poison  mainly  to  an 
allusive  treatment.  Perhaps  he  knew  that  the  false  teaching 
was  advancing  to  the  assault  from  the  most  diverse  quarters  ; 
but  every  variety  was  alike  worthy  of  condemnation.  We 
should  be  fundamentally  mistaken  as  to  the  position  of  the 
Pastoral  Epistles  if  we  pressed  these  false  teachers  rigidly 
into  three  classes  :  the  evil  and  hopeless  men  of  the  last  times, 
against  whom  the  author  only  wished  to  prepare  his  readers  ; 
the  blasphemers  of  the  present,  who  were  already  excommuni- 
cate ;  and  the  ETspoS&aa-icaXovvTBs  within  the  Church,  re- 
commended to  the  watchful  discipline  of  the  vicars — a  com- 
paratively harmless  class,  which  had  merely  lost  sight  of  the 
serious  morality  of  Christianity  in  its  fondness  for  rabbinical 
or  ascetic  fancies.  Although  these  false  teachers  may  be 
somewhat  shadowy  figures  to  us,  they  need  not  have  been 
so  to  the  author's  contemporaries.  Nor  must  we  forget 
that  the  writer  was  bound  to  maintain  the  role  of  Paul,  and 
therefore  can  only  utter  his  warnings  in  the  form  of  pro- 
phecy. For  this  very  reason  he  cannot  be  over-precise  in  his 
outlines.  Now,  it  was  only  in  the  second  century  that  this 
struggle  for  existence  between  subjectivism  and  the  true 
and  wholesome  doctrine,  the  Apostolic  tradition,  became  the 
chief  concern  of  the  Church,  just  as  the  rigid  organisation  of 
the  Church  became  closely  bound  up  with  the  same  movement. 
(1  ranted  that  the  writer  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles  was  one  who 
actively  participated  in  such  a  struggle,  one  who,  realising  the 
danger,  did  not  hesitate,  in  self-defence,  to  employ  the  doubt- 
ful weapon  of  supposititious  Pauline  Epistles,  these  Epistles 
could  only  have  been  written  after  the  year  100.  And  taking 

1  1.  Tim.  iv.  3,  v.  2:5.  2  2.  Tim.  ii.  18. 


§  13.]  TIIK    PASTORAL    BPISTLKS  197 

the  external  evidence  into  account,  we  should  fix  upon  the  first 
quarter  of  the  second  century. 

As  to  the  writer's  place  of  abode  it  is  best  to  abstain  from 
all  conjecture.  Many  have  suggested  Rome,  basing  their 
suggestion  on  occasional  Latinisms  in  the  language  ;  but 
these  have  little  significance,  and  there  is  no  other  local 
colouring.  The  author  must  certainly  have  belonged  to  the 
ministry,  and  it  is  probable  that  he  may  even  have  been 
born  of  Christian  parents,1  but  there  is  no  evidence  whatso- 
ever to  show  that  he  was  of  Jewish  extraction.2 

5.  The  idea  of  imparting  advice  and  warning  to  Christen- 
dom in  the  name  of  Paul  probably  came  to  our  unknown 
author  from  observation  of  the  exasperating  fact  that  the 
false  teachers  sometimes  claimed  the  authority  of  Paul  for 
their  vain  doctrine,  and  sometimes  treated  it  with  open  con- 
tempt. This  is  the  reason  why  he  lays  so  much  stress,  now 
on  the  Apostolic  rights  of  Paul,  and  now  on  the  fact  that  his 
message  contained  nothing  but  the  plain  Gospel  received 
direct  from  the  Son  of  God  appearing  in  flesh  as  the 
Saviour  of  sinners.  His  object  was  to  make  the  true  Paul 
give  his  opinion  unmistakably  on  the  false  Paulinists  as  well 
as  on  the  outspoken  Anti-Paulinists.  To  the  question  why 
the  author  made  Paul  write  to  Timothy  and  Titus  rather  than 
to  anyone  else,  we  might  answer :  because  his  object  was  to 
furnish  admonitions  in  the  Apostle's  name  to  the  heads  of  the 
Church,  and  for  such  a  part  the  best  known  of  his  trusted 
comrades  were  the  most  suitable  ;  they  were  at  once  Paul's 
disciples,  whom  he  could  teach  and  counsel  in  fatherly  tones, 
and  his  trusted  followers,  whom  he  could  endue  with  Apo- 
stolic authority  to  establish  discipline  and  order  in  Gentile 
communities.  It  is  far  more  difficult  to  answer  the  further 
question :  why  the  anonymous  author  drew  up  three 
epistles  when  one  would  have  sufficed,  and  in  what  order  he 
composed  the  three.  We  may  venture  the  conjecture  that 
from  the  first  he  intended  to  produce  more  than  one  epistle, 
and  perhaps  chose  the  number  three  to  begin  with ;  if  Paul 
communicated  the  same  instructions  from  different  situations, 
to  different  men,  working  in  entirely  different  provinces,  the 

1  2.  Tim.  i.  3,  iiL  15.  2  See  Titus  i.  10,  of  IK  rfjs 


198        AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

weight  of  his  utterance  would  be  effectively  increased.  Then 
no  doubt  would  remain  that  Paul  had  laid  down  binding 
laws  for  the  whole  Church  and  for  all  times.  With  regard  to 
the  order  in  which  they  were  written,  we  may  reasonably 
assert  that  1.  Timothy  and  Titus  display  the  closest  con- 
nection ;  2.  Timothy  might  rather  be  called  the  author's 
trump-card,  by  which  he  made  the  dying  Apostle  hand  over 
his  last  will  and  testament  to  a  successor  in  the  ministry. 
This  is  a  situation  which  would  naturally  call  forth  tenderer 
as  well  as  harsher  tones.  Moreover,  on  this  supposition  we 
should  behold  the  writer's  powers  increasing  before  our  eyes, 
for  in  2.  Timothy  he  certainly  approaches  most  nearly  to 
the  real  Epistles  of  Paul  in  expression,  thought  and  attitude. 
This  observation,  again,  leads  up  to  another  hypothesis, 
viz.  that  genuine  Pauline  material  may  have  been  incorporated 
in  the  Pastoral  Epistles — notes  or  fragments  of  the  Apostle's 
letters  to  those  two  friends.  To  a  lively  fancy,  Hymenseus, 
Alexander  and  Philetus  ]  may  appear  as  '  figures  of  flesh  and 
blood  ' ;  and  indeed  the  personal  references  in  2.  Timothy  i.  15, 
18  and  iv.  9-18,  19-21,  and  in  Titus  iii.  12,  15,  have  little 
or  no  connection  with  the  main  tendencies  of  the  Epistles. 
It  is  suggested  that  Paul's  request  in  2.  Timothy  iv.  13  sounds 
too  simple  to  have  been  invented,  and  large  portions  of 
2.  Timothy  -  or  Titus  3  contain  no  teaching  which,  regarded  by 
itself,  would  surprise  us  as  coming  from  the  mouth  of  Paul. 
The  critics  have  therefore  set  to  work  with  much  zeal  to 
extract  the  authentic  parts,  even  down  to  individual  words 
and  syllables,  from  the  existing  Pastoral  Epistles,  and  have 
then  pieced  these  together  with  great  skill  to  form  two, 
three  and  even  more  genuine.Epistles  of  Paul,  perfect  and  un- 
impaired. On  the  other  hand,  Harnack,  who  also  believes  in 
some  such  genuine  foundation  underlying  the  Pastoral 
Epistles,  has  discovered  yet  a  third  hand  in  the  present  text. 
He  thinks  that  about  the  year  150  some  scribe  interpolated 
the  portions  of  1.  Timothy4  and  Titus"'  concerning  the  disci- 
pline of  the  Church,'as  well  as  the  ending  of  1.  Timothy/'  with 
the  warning  against  Marcion's  '  Antitheses.' 

1  1.  Tim.  i.  20  ;  2.  Tim.  ii.  17.  2  E.g.,  i.  7-12,  and  ii.  3-13. 

8  iii.  1-8.        4  iii.  1-13  and  parts  of  chapter  v.      *  i.  7-9.       6  vi.  17-21. 


§  13.]  TIIM    PASTOKM,    Kl'ISTLKS  199 

I  cannot  accept  either  of  these  hypotheses.  We  must 
of  course  take  care  not  to  assert  that  the  employment  of 
genuine  fragments  by  the  nameless  author,  or  the  interpola- 
tion of  later  additions  into  his  own  work,  was  impossible  in 
itself ;  but  the  impression  of  unity  given  by  the  whole, 
especially  of  the  close  connection  originally  existing  between 
all  the  parts  referring  to  the  discipline  of  the  Church,  in  my 
opinion  outweighs  the  force  of  the  arguments  brought  forward 
in  favour  of  a  division  of  the  material  among  several  authors, 
one  writing  about  the  year  60,  one  about  110,  and  one  about 
150.  The  author  brought  forward  these  numerous  names  and 
facts  (which  are  to  be  found  especially  in  2.  Timothy  and 
Titus)  of  set  purpose,  in  order  to  give  his  work  the  closest 
possible  connection  with  the  genuine  Pauline  Epistles ;  he 
obtained  his  materials  in  part  from  the  collection  of  Epistles 
accessible  to  him  as  to  us,  and  from  the  Acts ;  in  part  he 
added  to  them  by  free  invention,  in  the  manner  to  be  exhibited 
soon  afterwards  in  the  'Acts  of  Paul.'  Here  he  would,  of 
course,  make  occasional  allusions — which  we  are  naturally 
unable  to  follow — to  personal  matters  and  occurrences  of  the 
moment.  2.  Timothy  iv.  9-18  is  intended  (and  successfully) 
to  awaken  the  sympathy  of  the  reader  with  the  disillusioned, 
lonely,  poverty-stricken  Apostle,  deprived  even  of  his  books, 
to  arouse  admiration  for  his  strength  and  thereby  to  increase 
the  effect  of  his  former  warnings.  The  entreaty  to  Timothy 
to  come  quickly,1  recurring  in  the  middle  of  the  messages 
of  greeting,  is  well  calculated  to  represent  the  pathetic 
longing  of  the  man.  The  other  passages  which  bear  the 
mark  of  Paul's  style  are  successful  imitations ;  the  skill  with 
which,  if  genuine,  the  anonymous  author  must  be  credited 
for  working  them  up  into  his  own  material  is  at  least  as 
remarkable  as  that  which  their  simple  invention  would  have 
entailed.  However,  even  there  he  is  not  quite  Paul ;  but  no  one 
can  doubt  his  wish  to  be  Paul,  and  Paul  alone,  in  these  Epistles. 
Those  who  consider  it  an  axiom  that  Pseudepigrapha  are  only 
the  work  of  fools  who  betray  the  forger  with  every  word,  have 
no  resource  but  to  cast  off  or  to  conceal  all  doubts  as  to  the 
genuineness  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles.  But  it  does  not  surprise 

1  iv.  19-21. 


200       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  n. 

me,  considering  the  extraordinarily  fine  perception  sometimes 
displayed  by  the  author  of  the  Acts  in  the  discourses  he  puts 
into  the  mouth  of  his  hero,  corresponding  as  they  do  to  his 
individuality  and  to  the  given  situation,  that  another  Christian, 
whose  work  was  made  so  much  more  easy  by  his  long  study 
of  the  ten  Pauline  Epistles,  should  not  long  afterwards  '  have 
undertaken  to  write  epistles  in  Paul's  name  to  secure  the 
welfare  of  the  distressed  Church — epistles  in  which  the  public 
of  that  time  found  Paul  again,  complete  as  they  pictured 
him,  the  Apostle  of  the  true  faith  and  the  champion  of 
morality  and  order  in  all  the  churches.  The  skill  of  the 
unknown  writer — although,  to  my  mind,  somewhat  premedi- 
tated— deserved  its  success,  because  it  was  not  self-seeking. 
The  Church  accepted  without  question  the  '  word  of  Paul ' 
of  which  she  stood  in  so  much  need,  and  she  rewarded  the 
Pseudo-Paul  for  his  work  by  speedily  including  his  productions 
in  the  collection  of  the  Apostolic  Epistles,  although  for 
force  of  intellect  and  wealth  of  ideas  they  can  endure  no 
comparison  with  the  genuine  Pauline  Epistles  or  with  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews. 

1  About  110. 


201 


CHAPTER  III 

THE   CATHOLIC    EPISTLES 

§  14.  A  general  Survey  of  the  Catholic  Epistles 

THE  name  '  Catholic  Epistles,'  under  which  we  include  to-day 
the  seven  shorter  New  Testament  Epistles  which  are  not 
ascribed  to  Paul,  was  thoroughly  familiar  to  Eusebius,1  about 
325.  Origen 2  also  used  it  frequently,  although  only  in  the 
singular  of  individual  Epistles,  such  as  1  John,  Jude  and 
1.  Peter.  Dionysius  of  Alexandria :i  applies  the  word '  Catholic  ' 
to  the  1st  Epistle  of  John,  apparently  in  contradistinction  to 
the  2nd  and  3rd.  But  perhaps  the  oldest  record  of  it  that  we 
possess  is  to  be  found  in  the  writings  of  the  Antimontanist 
Apollonius,4  who  attributes  to  the  heretic  Themison  the  com- 
position of  a  Catholic  Epistle  in  imitation  of  that  of  '  the 
apostle'  (John?).  In  any  case,  this  title  clung  to  it  long 
afterwards — e.g.  in  the  writings  of  Socrates  and  Theodoretus 
in  the  fifth  century — and  especially  in  the  form  'Ivdvvov  7} 
Ka6o\iKr).  Now,  since  Eusebius  declared  that  most  of  the 
Catholic  Epistles  were  disputed,  he  cannot  have  understood 
the  name  to  mean  as  much  as  *  recognised  by  the  whole 
Church ' ;  nor  can  Origen,  for  he  called  the  Epistle  of 
Barnabas  *  Catholic '  too ;  and  least  of  all  Apollonius. 
'  Catholic '  in  this  connection  has  a  mere  outward  significance  ; 
the  epithet  was  probably  intended  in  the  first  instance  to 
denote  1.  John  unequivocally  as  encyclical,  addressed  to  the 
world  at  large,  and,  as  it  were,  official,  as  distinct  from  such 
private  letters  as  2.  and  3.  John  and  the  Pauline  Epistles, 
which  were  addressed  to  single  persons  or  communities.  In  this 

1  Died  in  340.  3  Died  254. 

3  About  200  A.D.     See  Eusebius,  Historic*  Ecclcs.  VII.  25,  vii.  and  x. 

4  About  197  A.D.     See  Eusebius,  V.  18. 


202       AN   INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  in. 

sense  Jude  and  2.  Peter  were  Catholic,  and  possibly  James 
also,  if  the  *  twelve  tribes ' l  were  intended  to  signify  the  new 
people  of  God  ;  while  1.  Peter  was  at  any  rate  addressed  to 
half  the  Christian  world.  The  whole  collection  of  non-Pauline 
Epistles  would  then  in  a  short  time  have  been  so  designated, 
a  parte  potiori,  and  the  name  restricted  to  these  seven.  The 
Epistle  of  Barnabas  is  actually  distinguished  by  Eusebius 2  from 
the  Catholic  Epistles,  and  the  custom  soon  arose  of  making 
quotations  from  the  latter  under  this  title,  as  well  as  from 
'  the  Apostle,'  or  fourteen  Pauline  Epistles.  When  the  name 
became  known  in  the  West,  however,  it  was  misinterpreted, 
for  the  word  *  Catholic  '  represented  a  dogmatic  idea  to  the 
Latins,  and  not  one  of  form,  and  it  was  replaced  by  the 
presumedly  synonymous  term  '  Canonical,'  i.e.  genuine,  part 
(according  to  the  doctrine  of  the  Church)  of  the  divine 
Scriptures :  in  which  case  there  could  no  longer  be  any  idea 
of  contradistinction  to  the  Pauline  Epistles.  Not  till  the 
Middle  Ages  did  the  older  name  '  Catholic  Epistles  '  become 
general  in  the  West  as  well,  and  even  then  it  was  scarcely 
better  understood  than  it  had  been  in  former  times. 

2.  The  Church  showed  a  proper  instinct  in  gathering  this 
set  of  letters  together.  Augustine  himself  observed  ;  that 
whereas  Paul  in  his  Epistles  carried  his  support  of  the  thesis 
that  man  was  justified  by  faith,  without  the  works  of  the  law, 
so  far  that  there  was  some  danger  of  misunderstanding  him, 
the  Epistles  of  the  other  Apostles,  Peter,  John,  James  and  Jude, 
were  written  with  the  very  intention  of  enforcing  the  doctrine 
that  faith  without  works  was  useless.  This,  however,  contains 
some  exaggeration,  and  the  Pastoral  Epistles  must  be  excepted 
in  such  a  judgment  of  Paul.  But  it  is  true  that  such  a  differ- 
ence does  exist  between  the  respective  levels  and  the  dominant 
ideas  of  the  two  collections  ;  Paul  occupies  himself  through- 
out in  laying  the  foundations,  the  authors  of  the  Catholic 
Epistles  in  raising  the  superstructure ;  he  is  concerned  with 
the  genuineness  of  the  root,  they  with  that  of  the  fruit ;  he 
feels  himself  a  minister  of  the  Gospel,  they  speak  in  the  name 
of  the  Church — already  becoming  the  Catholic  Church. 

1  James  i.  1.  'J  ffistoria  Eccles.  VI.  14,  i. 

3  De  Fide  et  Operibus,  xiv.  21 


§  14.]      GENERAL   SURVEY    OF    TIIK    CATHOLIC    KPISTLKS       203 

In  spite  of  the  fact  that  according  to  the  superscriptions 
these  Epistles  are  divided  among  four  authors— one  being 
assigned  to  James  and  one  to  Jude,  two  to  Peter,  and  three 
to  John — all  of  them,  that  is,  to  men  of  the  earliest  Apo- 
stolic circles — there  yet  exist  numerous  points  of  relationship 
between  them.  Above  all  they  have  this  peculiarity  in 
common,  that  their  contents,  taken  as  a  whole,  even  though  the 
addresses  may,  as  in  2.  and  3.  John,  seem  to  deny  it,  concern 
the  Church  in  general ;  they  lack  the  personal  stamp,  and  neces- 
sities universally  felt  are  met  by  them  with  counsel  universal 
in  tone.  Ephesians,  Hebrews  and  the  Pastoral  Epistles  no 
doubt  form  the  transition  to  this  class  of  epistle,  but  the 
individuality  of  the  letter-writer  and  the  peculiarities  of  the 
epistle  here  retire  still  further  into  the  background  :  the  epistle 
is  merely  the  literary  form  in  which  the  unknown  writer  holds 
intercourse  with  an  unknown  public,  and  one  might  almost  say 
that  this  form  was  then  the  fashion  of  the  moment,  were  it 
not  that  its  approved  value,  realised  through  the  beneficent 
influence  of  the  Pauline  heritage,  was  evidently  the  cause  of 
its  retention.  The  authors  of  the  Catholic  Epistles — and  we 
need  not  suppose  that  they  devoted  very  much  reflection  to 
it— simply  wrote  epistles  because  they  already  possessed  the 
letters  of  '  the  Apostle,'  and  this  already  implies  that  these 
epistles  can  only  have  sprung  from  post-Pauline  times,  and 
therefore  not  from  any  of  the  Primitive  Apostles. 

They  are  all  of  trifling  bulk — Jude  and  2.  and  3.  John  quite 
short,  about  the  same  length  as  Philemon ;  James,  1.  Peter 
and  1.  John,  which  are  all  of  about  equal  length,  a  little 
longer  than  Colossians,  and  2.  Peter  not  much  longer  than 
2.  Thessalonians.  Not  one  of  these  writers  engages  in  far- 
reaching  trains  of  thought  or  searching  investigations  ;  the 
Epistles  contain  little  theology,  but  all  the  more  practical 
advice  for  the  life  of  the  Christian  and  of  the  Church,  together 
with  much  edifying  exhortation  in  the  epistolary  form,  the 
ideas  loosely  strung  together.  The  modest  proportion  here 
maintained  between  the  value  and  the  extent  of  the  subject- 
matter,  must  have  decidedly  assisted  their  circulation  and 
recognition  ;  epistles  like  the  1st  and  2nd  of  Clement  and  the 
Epistle  of  Barnabas  would  on  account  of  their  length  have 


204      AX    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  in. 

had  much  greater  difficulty  in  establishing  themselves  in  all 
communities,  even  though  they  had  been  ticketed  with  the 
names  of  Apostolic  authors.  Moreover,  the  history  of  the 
reception  of  the  Catholic  Epistles  *  at  once  leads  us  to  consider 
that  they  represent  the  product  of  a  later  time  than  that  of 
the  ten  Pauline  Epistles  ;  only  1.  John  and  1.  Peter  were  con- 
sidered Canonical  writings  as  early  as  the  second  century,  while 
2.  John,  Jude  and  3.  John  followed  slowly  from  the  year  200 
onwards,  and  James  and  2.  Peter  hardly  appeared  at  all  before 
the  third  century. 

§  15.  The  First  Epistle  of  Peter 

[Cf.  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  vol.  xii. :  '  Brief e  Petri  und  Judae,'  by  E. 
Kiihl,  1897  (ed.  6) ;  Hand-Cominentar  iii.  2;  Hebrews,  1.  and  2. 
Peter,  James  and  Jude,  by  H.  von  Soden,  1899  (ed.  3).  The  mono- 
graph of  J.  M.  Usteri  (1887)  is  full  and  well-reasoned  in  matters  of 
exegesis,  but  too  strongly  biased  in  questions  of  criticism  by  a  desire 
to  uphold  the  authenticity  of  the  Epistles.  See  also  Ad.  Harnack  : 
'  Die  Chronologie  der  altchristlichen  Litteratur,'  i.  451-465 
(1.  Peter) ;  465-470  (Jude  and  2.  Peter).  Against  Harnack's  hypo- 
thesis as  to  1.  Peter  see  W.  Wrede  in  the  '  Zeitschrift  fur  die  Neu- 
testamentliche  Wissenschaft,'  i.  pp.  75-85.] 

1.  A  sharp  distinction  exists  between  the  body  of  the 
Epistle,  on  the  one  hand,  and,  on  the  other,  the  address  and 
greeting  and  the  conclusion,'2  with  salutations  and  blessing.  To 
divide  this  body  into  its  separate  members  is  a  difficult  busi- 
ness ;  and  an  arrangement  decided  on  by  the  author  himself 
is  undiscoverable,  because  it  never  existed. 

Verses  i.  3-12  form  an  introduction,  not  unlike  those  of 
the  Pauline  Epistles,  consisting  in  praise  to  God  that  he  had 
caused  those  to  whom  the  Epistle  was  addressed  to  be  born 
anew  to  the  living  hope,  in  a  glorious  salvation  not  to  be 
dimmed  by  any  suffering.  Upon  this  follows  the  first  and 
larger  part,3  hortative  in  tone,  and  consisting  in  an  injunc- 
tion to  the  readers  to  live  holy  lives  in  accordance  with  this 
new  birth  and  living  hope,  freed  from  all  the  old  vices 

1   Sf-e  I'.utll.  *  v.  12-14.  3  i.  13-  ii.  10. 


§   15.]  T1IK     I-' HIST    KJ'ISTLK    OF    I'KTKK  205 

and  active  in  brotherly  love,  and  to  grow  as  God's  people 
in  communion  with  Christ,  the  living  corner-stone.  The 
second  part L  gives  more  particular  directions  as  to  the  line  of 
conduct  to  be  pursued  towards  the  Gentiles  and  towards  those 
in  authority,  by  slaves  towards  their  masters — and  here 
follows  a  digression  upon  the  suffering  of  Christ  as  our 
example2- -by  women  towards  their  husbands  and  by  men 
towards  their  wives,  and  finally  by  every  man  towards  his 
fellow-believers.  This  is  followed  by  a  passage3  in  which 
meekness  and  patience  in  suffering  are  very  earnestly  en- 
joined, and  the  sufferings  of  Christ  with  their  blessings  both  to 
the  living  and  the  dead  are  called  to  mind  ;  here,  too,  occur 
the  famous  sentences  about  Christ's  '  descent  into  Hell.' 4  The 
third  part,  from  iv.  7  to  v.  11,  is  that  with  least  inner  cohesion. 
The  writer  begins 5  with  urging  his  readers  not  to  forget 
prayer  and  love,  since  the  end  was  drawing  near,  for  in  them 
each  individual  could  serve  the  community ;  then6  he  bids  them 
see  that  they  suffered  not  as  evil-doers  but  only  as  Christians, 
whereby  suffering  was  turned  into  joy.  Then  he  appeals  to 
the  elders  to  discharge  their  duty  towards  the  flock  with  un- 
selfish faithfulness,  and  likewise  to  the  young  men  to  perform 
theirs  with  humility  towards  the  old.7  The  closing  verses  8 
contain  a  final  exhortation  to  all  to  march  on  humbly  towards 
eternal  glory,  prepared,  in  these  evil  times,  for  battle  with  the 
devil,  and  full  of  trust  in  God. 

2.  If  no  more  than  the  address  and  ending  of  the  Epistle 
had  been  preserved,  there  might  certainly  be  some  difference 
of  opinion  as  to  its  object.  According  to  v.  12,  the  author 
meant  to  exhort  his  readers  briefly  and  to  declare  to  them  that 
that  wherein  they  were  established  was  the  true  grace  of  God. 
According  to  i.  1,  the  author  is  the  Apostle  Peter,  and  the  readers 
are  the  Christians  of  '  Pontus,  Galatia,  Cappadocia,  Asia  and 
Bithynia.'  They  are  solemnly  proclaimed  '  the  elect  who  are 
sojourners  of  the  dispersion ' ;  and  here  our  thoughts  naturally 
turn  to  Jewish  Christians,  since  Peter,  as  we  know,9  held  the 
Apostolate  of  the  circumcision.  Did  Peter,  then,  wish  to 

1  ii.  11-iv.  6.  2  ii.  21-2',.  '  iii.  13-iv.  6. 

4  iii.  19-21,  iv.  6.  5  iv.  7-11.  ti  iv.  12-19. 

7  v.  1-5.  8  v.  6-11.  9  Gal.  ii.  8. 


206      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  in. 

confirm  them  in  that  form  of  the  Gospel  which  he  had  brought 
them,  or  had  caused  his  disciples  ]  to  bring  them — perhaps 
in  opposition  to  the  enticements  of  Paul  towards  an  abandon- 
ment of  the  Law  ?  But  no,  this  is  impossible,  for  according  to 
i.  14,  18,  ii.  9  fol.  and  iv.  3  fol.  the  addressees  are  converted 
Gentiles,  and  from  this  it  would  appear  that  the  title  in  the 
address  should  be  understood  figuratively.  The  Christians 
in  these  five  provinces,  as  elsewhere,  were  merely  sojourners 
upon  the  earth,  pilgrims  2  without  the  rights  of  citizens  3  ; 
and  they  are  called  '  the  Dispersion  '  simply  because  they 
were  isolated,  without  country,  few  in  number 4  and  scattered 
among  immense  majorities  of  unbelievers.  But  the  Gentile 
Christian  communities  of  Galatia  and  Asia  owed  their 
Christianity  to  Paul ;  must  we,  then,  suppose  that  in 
v.  12  Peter  wished  to  testify  that  their  Pauline  Gospel  was 
true  and  divine — unless  indeed,  on  the  principles  of  the 
Tubingen  school,  we  take  the  view  that  a  later  writer 
was  attempting  in  this  way  to  demonstrate  the  unanimity 
between  Peter  and  Paul  in  the  interests  of  the  party  of  union  ? 
Such  intentions  as  these,  however,  have  simply  been  imported 
into  the  Epistle  ;  nowhere  do  we  find  a  comparison  between  the 
heritage  entrusted  to  the  readers  and  that  delivered  to  Peter, 
nor  is  the  remark  in  verse  v.  12  intended  to  furnish  the  key 
to  the  Epistle,  as  though  its  contents  could  not  be  understood 
without  it,  but  has  exactly  the  same  value  as  Hebrews  xiii.  22, 
'  Accept  our  word  of  exhortation  and  our  testimony.'  The 
readers  needed  such  exhortation  because  their  faith,  their 
obedience,  their  advance  in  sanctification  was  now  in  peril ; 
the  trial  of  manifold  temptations  had  overwhelmed  them :> ; 
and  therefore  it  could  not  be  impressed  upon  them  too  strongly 
that  even  though  faith  were  attended  with  shame  and  suffering, 
it  was  nevertheless  the  purest  grace. 

Every  word  of  the  Epistle  is  directed  towards  encouraging 
and  strengthening  the  readers  in  the  face  of  persecution  and 
suffering  :  they  were  not  on  that  account  to  lose  sight  of  the 
great  hope  or  to  fall  back  exhausted  into  the  old  ways,  nay 


i.  12,  25.  2  Cf.  also  i.  17  and  ii.  11. 

Cf.  Heb.  xiii.  14.         4  iii.  20  ;  cf .  the  IK\(KTO\  Siaairopas  of  Matt.  xxii.  14. 

Mentioned  as  early  as  i.  6. 


§  15.]  THE    FIRST    EPISTLE    OF    PETKR  207 

rather,  by  dwelling  in  light,  love  and  purity,  they  must 
provoke  the  admiration  of  their  enemies,  and  advance  the 
victory  of  the  Gospel.  It  is  true  that  the  author  also  gives 
advice  which  would  he  equally  fitting  for  times  of  peace,1  but 
lie  lays  stress  on  the  fact  that  through  suffering  the  average 
level  of  Christianity  must  and  should  be  raised.2  The  true  , 
Christian  as  shown  in  suffering  —that  is  the  theme  of  the 
Epistle,  and  it  is  in  this  direction  that  the  picture  of  Christ 
is  turned  as  often  as  it  is  brought  in  ;  the  object  this  so-called 
Peter  had  in  view  was  neither  one  of  Church  policy  nor  of 
polemical  dogma — for  nowhere  is  there  any  mention  of  heresies 
—but  simply  and  solely  one  of  practical  utility.  He  refrains  * 
entirely  from  supporting  these  practical  ideas  even  by  a 
substructure  of  dogmatic  theology,  after  the  manner  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.  The  secret  of  the  attraction  that 
his  work  retains  to  the  present  day  is  to  be  found  in  this 
uniformity  of  tone  and  in  the  living  warmth  which  pervades 
it ;  since  it  does  not  profess  to  offer  a  profound  revelation,  no 
one  feels  that  anything  is  wanting  in  it ;  it  stands  as  a 
masterpiece  of  edifying  discourse,  which  errs  neither  on  the 
side  of  the  pedantic  nor  of  the  trivial. 

3.  We  may  assert  without  hesitation  that  if  the  first  word,  „ 
Peter,  of  our  Epistle  were  absent,  no  one  would  have  imagined 
that  it  had  been  composed  by  him.  Silvanus,  who  appears 
to  have  acted  as  scribe,  we  only  know  elsewhere  as  the 
companion  of  Paul,  and  Mark,  too,  is  attested  by  Philemon  3 
and  Colossians 4  as  having  been  among  Paul's  companions 
at  least  as  the  latter  grew  old.  And  almost  everyone 
understands  the  words  '  She  that  is  in  Babylon,  elect  together 
with  you,' 5  as  applying  to  the  community  of  Eome,  the 
spiritual  Babylon,*5  where  Paul  lived  for  several  years  after 
the  year  60 ;  and  what  connecting  links  could  have  existed 
between  Peter  and  the  Pauline  communities  of  Asia  Minor  ? 
How  much  easier  it  would  be,  in  the  face  of  all  this,  to  believe 
in  its  Pauline  authorship !  The  language  is  not  precisely 
that  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians,  but  still  it  is  a  fluent 

1  iii.  3-7,  iv.  7-11,  v.  1-5.  2  iv.  16  fol. 

8  Verse  24.  4  iv.  10,  and  cf.  2.  Tim.  iv.  11. 

*  v.  13.  a  Bev.  xiv.-xviii. 


208      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  in. 

Greek — less  Hebraistic  even  than  Paul's ;  are  we,  then,  to 
attribute  this  to  Peter,  who  needed  an  interpreter  when  he 
was  upon  Greek  soil,  and  is  it  likely  that  the  Palestinian  Peter 
would  simply  have  quoted  the  Old  Testament  from  the 
Septuagint,  as  is  here  the  case,  and  that  his  thoughts  should 
have  moved  in  the  forms  of  the  Septuagint  ?  For  he  abounds 
even  in  unintentional  echoes  from  it.  This  fact,  apart  from 
other  niceties  of  Greek  expression,  makes  it  impossible  that 
Silvanus  should  have  translated  an  Aramaic  Epistle  of  Peter  l 
into  Greek.  In  that  case  we  should  have  to  go  a  step  further, 
and  believe,  with  Zahn,  that  Peter  had  left  the  composition 
of  the  Epistle  to  Silvanus,  because  he  considered  him  better 
qualified  for  the  task  than  he  was  himself.  But  then 
verses  v.  12-14  would  still  be  a  postscript  written  by  the 
Apostle,  and  the  Epistle  would  remain  a  partial  Pseudepigraph, 
since  in  the  superscription  it  definitely  professes  to  be  an 
Epistle  of  the  Apostle  Peter. 

This  hypothesis  is  scarcely  more  probable  than  Von 
Soden's,  particularly  as  it  presumes  an  extraordinary  mea- 
sure of  self-depreciation  in  Peter.  According  to  Von  Soden, 
Silvanus  composed  the  Epistle  in  his  old  age,  long  after  the  death 
of  Peter,  in  accordance  with  the  ideas  of  the  inspired  Apostle. 
But  could  we  credit  the  author,  as  we  must  in  this  case,  with  so 
blatant  a  piece  of  self-praise  as  that  contained  in  v.  12?  and  is 
it  likely  that  Silvanus,  about  the  year  80,  would  not  have  con- 
sidered his  own  authority  sufficient  to  give  fatherly  counsel  to 
oppressed  brethren  in  the  Pauline  mission-district  ?  One  thing 
there  is  in  favour  of  both  forms  of  the  Silvanus  hypothesis 
— it  explains  the  remarkably  Pauline  attitude  of  the  First 
Epistle  of  Peter  quite  satisfactorily.  The  Epistle  does  not  of 
course  pretend  to  be  the  expression  of  any  school  of  theological 
opinion,  and  therefore  it  takes  up  neither  a  positive  nor  a 
negative  position  upon  any  of  the  important  and  radical 
principles  of  Paulinism,  but  it  reminds  us  of  the  Pauline  Gospel 
much  more  strongly  than  do  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews 
or  the  Pastoral  Epistles  ;  in  its  conceptions  of  Christ,  of  the 
saving  power  of  his  death,  of  faith  and  of  the  new  birth,  it 
both  breathes  the  Pauline  spirit  and  makes  use  of  the  Pauline 

1  v.  12. 


§  15.]  TIIK    FIRST    KPISTLK    OF    I'KTKK  209 

formulae.1  There  care,  moreover,  countless  points  of  contact 
with  passages  in  the  Pauline  writings  —  most  conspicuously 
with  Eomans  and  Ephesians  2  —which  cannot  have  been  the 
work  of  chance,  especially  as,  even  in  its  mere  outward  forms, 
in  the  address  and  ending,  there  is  much  that  reminds  us  very 
strongly  of  Paul.  And  it  is  actually  a  fact  that  serious  attempts 
have  been  made  to  ascribe  Ephesians  and  1.  Peter  to  the  same 
writer.  But  in  truth  there  are  sufficient  points  of  distinction 
between  Paul  and  our  author  :  e.g.  the  latter's  preference  for 
picturesque  expression  and  for  conceptions  such  as  that  of  the 
salvation  of  souls  as  the  end  of  faith,3  whereas  Paul  did  not 
value  the  tyv  yai  so  highly  ;  but  such  differences  in  a  disciple 
of  Paul  would  present  no  difficulties. 

However,  the  Epistle  has  been  handed  down  to  us  as  the 
work  of  Peter,  not  of  Silvanus,  and  it  behoves  us  to  show  that 
this  tradition  is  untenable.  The  resolute  party  of  defence, 
which  attaches  more  value  to  the  single  word  Usrpos  in 
verse  1  than  to  the  evidence  of  the  whole  of  the  rest  of  the 
Epistle,  is  now  placed  in  the  following  dilemma.  Either  it 
must  assume  (1)  that  the  Epistle  was  written  by  Peter  before 
the  appearance  of  the  Pauline  Epistles,  i.e.  about  53  or  54,  in 
which  case  (a)  the  independence  asserted  by  Paul  in  the 
Epistle  to  the  Galatians  becomes  a  grievous  delusion,  since 
he  would  have  owed  not  only  the  kernel  of  his  Gospel  but 
even  his  epistolary  style  to  Peter  ;  (b)  he  must,  contrary  to  his 
principles,  have  worked  upon  a  field  over  which  Peter  had 
prior  rights  ;  (c)  the  history  of  the  Apostolic  times  becomes 
an  absolute  riddle,  for  we  should  find  Peter,  who  had  just 
been  publicly  rebuked  by  Paul  at  Antioch  4  for  exercising  a 
moral  pressure  towards  Judaism  upon  the  Gentile  Christians, 
writing  immediately  afterwards  to  Christian  communities 
in  a  manner  by  which  it  might  be  supposed  that  such  a  tiling 
as  a  written  norm  for  the  social  conduct  of  mankind  —  the 


1  E.g.,  tv  XpiffTy,  iii.  16,  v.  10  and  14  ;  ^cooTotetv,  iii.  18  ;  OTTO/C^AU^S  and 
airoKa\vwreffdai  six  times,  and  as  often  avacrTpoQ-fi. 

-  E.g.,  1.  Peter  iv.  10  fol.  with  Bom.  xii.  6  fol.  ;  iii.  9  with  Horn.  xii.  17  and 
1.  Thess.  v.  15;  ii.  13-17  with  Rom.  xiii.  1-7;  iii.  22  with  Eph.  i.  20  fol.; 
iii.  18  (iva.  rjAtas  irpoffaydyr]  T<£  0ey)  with  Bom.  v.  2  and  Eph.  ii.  Is  and  iii.  12  ; 
v.  12  with  Bom.  v.  2. 

3  i.  9,  and  cf.  ii.  11  and  25.  4  Gal.  ii.  11  fol. 

P 


210     AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  in. 

Law — did  not  exist :  that  he  knew  only  of  Christians,  not  of 
Jewish  or  Gentile  Christians  ;  and  (d)  we  should  be  forced  to 
admit  that  Peter  already  possessed  everything  in  Paul's 
teaching  which  helped  to  form  the  common  Christian  con- 
sciousness ;  that  even  without  the  abstruse  proofs  and  specula- 
tions of  Paul,  unintelligible  to  the  majority,  he  already 
possessed  the  Gospel  to  whose  victorious  establishment  Paul 
had  felt  himself  bound  to  sacrifice  the  strength  of  his  whole 
life  :  that  in  fact  Paul  was  a  superfluous  person  in  history— 
or  else  (2)  that  Peter  wrote  this  Epistle  after  Paul  had  written 
his,  at  the  beginning  of  64 — or,  if  he  did  not  die  till  after  the  per- 
secution of  Nero,  between  the  years  64  and  67 ;  in  that  case,  he 
learnt  from  Paul's  Epistles  and  actually  imitated  them.  But 
then  one  fails  to  understand  why  he  did  not  remind  his  readers, 
intimately  acquainted  as  they  were  with  Paul,  of  their  master 
himself  as  an  instance  of  the  suffering  hero,1  whose  fortunes 
verily  fitted  him  to  serve  as  an  example  to  his  spiritual 
children  in  similar  circumstances,  even  though  for  the  moment 
he  was  again  enjoying  his  freedom  ;  and  then,  above  all,  one 
would  have  to  assume  that  Paul  had  exercised  a  greater  influence 
on  Peter  than  had  Jesus  himself.  For  whereas  the  theological 
formulae  coined  by  Paul  are  to  be  found  in  1.  Peter,  it  is  with 
difficulty  that  a  few  points  of  resemblance  between  the  Epistle 
and  the  Gospels  have  been  traced,  while  the  main  ideas  of  the 
Gospels,  such  as  that  of  the  Son  of  Man,  of  the  Kingdom  of 
God  and  of  eternal  life,  are  not  to  be  found  in  it  at  all.  As 
the  sources  of  his  religion,  in  fact,  we  need  nothing  but  the 
Old  Testament  and  the  Epistles  of  Paul. 

But  in  either  case,  if  a  favourite  Apostle  of  Christ,  one  of 
the  *  pillars  of  the  Church,  could  write  to  a  community 
hitherto  unknown  to  him  ,without  offering  them  anything 
from  the  store  of  his  intercourse  with  Jesus,  without  indicat- 
ing in  any  way — except  by  the  colourless  *  I,  a  witness  of  the 
sufferings  of  Christ ' ;  —how  much  he  owed  to  this  companion- 
ship ;  if  he  could  only  speculate  about  Christ  (like  Paul,  win) 
had  never  seen  him  in  the  flesh :J )  instead  of  telling  his 
readers  about  him — then  I  do  not  see  what  this  superiority 
of  the  Primitive  Apostles  over  Paul  can  possibly  have  meant, 

1  Cf.  H.'l.iew^  xiii.  7.  -  v.  1.  s  Cf.  i.  8. 


§   15.]  TIIK    FIRST    KP1STLK    OF    PETER  I'll 

or  how  we  are  to  imagine  that  the  earliest  forms  of  the 
Gospels,  with  all  their  richness  of  material,  ever  arose.  Even 
this  Epistle,  in  short — and  of  all  the  Catholic  Epistles  it 
might  the  soonest  give  us  an  impression  of  naive  and 
primitive  Christianity — could  only  be  ascribed  to  Peter  by 
one  who  did  not  recognise  in  Jesus  that  mighty  personality 
which,  to  the  end  of  their  lives,  dominated  all  who  had  once 
been  drawn  beneath  its  sway.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
Epistle  was  the  work  of  Peter  himself,  we  must  assume  that 
he  was  lacking  in  all  originality,  and  simply  produced  a 
slavish  copy  of  the  Pauline  writings ;  that  he  had  belonged  to 
the  Pauline  party  at  Corinth  and  had  not  felt  himself  adapted 
to  be  the  head  of  a  party  of  his  own ;  that  the  Apostle  who  was 
pronounced  a  rock  by  the  judgment  of  Jesus  must  henceforth, 
by  the  judgment  of  Zahn,  be  considered  a  spirit  of  small 
originality,  not  to  be  compared  with  such  men  as  James,  Paul 
and  John :  a  man  accessible  by  nature  to  outside  influences,  who 
did  not  find  it  necessary  '  first  to  fight  his  battles  with  a  well- 
stamped  character  of  his  own,  in  order  then  to  work  for  the 
good  and  the  wholesome.'  Finally,  the  opposite  theory,  the 
assignment  of  1.  Peter  to  a  date  previous  to  1.  Thessalonians 
and  Galatians,  is  not  even  worthy  of  serious  discussion,  since 
Paul's  originality  is  beyond  all  suspicion,  and  Paul  would  not 
have  begun  his  mission-work  in  Galatia  and  Asia  if  flourish- 
ing Christian  communities  had  already  been  founded  there 
under  the  influence  of  Peter — as  we  should  be  obliged  to 
assume  from  v.  i.  fol. 

4.  But  the  tradition  is  untenable  for  the  simple  reason  that 
the  conditions  set  forth  in  the  Epistle  show  a  considerably 
later  date  than  the  period  between  the  years  50  and  67.  The 
author's  intimate  acquaintance  with  the  Pauline  writings 
(probably  including  Hebrews),  the  Gospels  and  the  Acts  points 
towards  none  too  early  a  date.  Seeing  that  the  office  of 
presbyter  had  already  become  so  profitable  that  men  had  to 
be  warned  against  tending  the  flock  for  filthy  lucre,1  and  that 
it  was  necessary  to  forbid  the  elders  to  oppress  the  young 
men,  and  the  young  men  to  be  insubordinate  to  the  elders, 
we  are  carried  on  at  least  as  far  as  the  period  in  which  the 

1  v.  2. 

p  2 


212       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  ill. 

strife  between  old  and  young  in  Corinth  gave  occasion  for  the 
composition  of  the  First  Epistle  of  Clement.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  Epistle  cannot  have  been  written  much  after  100, 
because  it  was  known  and  made  use  of  by  Polycarp,  Papias 
and  the  author  of  the  Epistle  of  James.  With  the  rough 
assignment,  then,  to  about  100  A.D.,  we  ought  not  to  be  very 
far  wrong.  The  Christian  communities  all  over  the  world  ' 
were  exposed  to  grievous  suffering  in  enduring  the  fiery  trial 
of  their  faith  2 — such  bitter  hardships  that  the  *  end  of  all 
things  ' 3  must  surely  be  at  hand.  The  Epistle  would  have 
adopted  a  different  tone  towards  isolated  instances  of  abuse  and 
persecution,  such  as  the  Christians  had  had  to  endure  from 
the  very  first ;  it  is  evident  that  here  the  period  of  systematic 
persecution,  in  which  there  was  no  escape  from  suffering, 
and  in  which  the  Christian  was  persecuted  for  his  Christianity's 
sake,4  had  set  in ;  the  Christians  had  attracted  the  notice 
and  the  jealous  hatred  of  the  Gentile  world,5  and  the  great 
stress  laid  upon  their  loyalty  even  towards  the  Imperial 
officials,  in  ii.  13-17,  makes  it  seem  very  probable  that  the 
Government  shared  this  jealousy,  since  iv.  15  evidently  points 
to  public  prosecutions  in  which  Christians  were  tried  for 
their  lives.  From  the  note  struck  in  iii.  17-iv.  1  as  well 
as  in  iv.  19  we  may  conclude  that  the  punishment  of  death 
was  already  decreed  against  the  Christians ;  in  speaking 
of  annoyances,  insults  and  slanders,  the  solemn  words  el  0s\oi 
TO  dsXrjfjba  rov  6sov,  Tracr^sti/,  would  be  somewhat  dispropor- 
tionate. It  is  a  further  proof  of  the  author's  good  sense  that 
he  does  not  make  more  ado  about  the  iniquity  of  these 
judicial  murders.  No  intemperate  complaint  of  the  open 
violence  offered  to  Christians  as  such,  would  have  been 
appropriate  from  the  mouth  of  Peter,  and,  moreover,  the 
author  did  not  wish  to  fan  the  flame  of  anger,  but  rather  to 
exhort  to  patience,  forbearance,  and  trust  in  God. 

Nevertheless,  the  name  of  Babylon  for  Rome  is  remark- 
able enough.  But  the  period  of  the  real  Christian  persecution 
began,  at  earliest,  under  the  Emperor  Domitian,'1  and  from 

1  v.  9.  -  iv.  12,  i.  7.  3  iv.  7,  17. 

4  iv.  16,  and  of.  iv.  14,  iii.  15-17.  5  ii.  12. 

•  81-%. 


$  15.]  THE    FIRST    EPISTLE    OF    I'KTKR  21o 

v.  9  we  may  evidently  conclude  that  the  writer  was  not 
thinking  only  of  the  crimes  of  Nero.  The  Epistle  would  seem 
to  refer  directly  to  the  enactments  of  Trajan  about  the  year  111, 
known  to  us  from  the  letters  of  Pliny  the  Younger,  if  we  take  the 
obscure  word  a\\oTpi£TrlcncoTTos  '  to  mean  the  judicial  informer, 
or  delator.  It  has,  however,  another  meaning  which  is  at  least 
equally  plausible,  that  of  a  '  persistent  meddler  ' :  so  that  we 
cannot  adopt  the  Edicts  of  Trajan  as  the  terminus  a  quo.  In 
these  times  of  distress  such  a  letter  of  consolation  was  of  course 
extremely  appropriate.  From  verse  v.  13  and  the  particularly 
numerous  points  of  resemblance  to  the  Epistle  to  the  Komans 
we  should  be  inclined  to  assume  that  the  author  was  a 
Roman  Christian,  writing  perhaps  just  as  some  disastrous 
piece  of  news  from  Asia  Minor  about  the  persecution  of  the 
Christians  there  had  reached  his  ears.  But  his  limitation  of 
the  address  to  the  Churches  of  five  provinces  of  Asia  Minor, 
in  spite  of  the  obviously  {  Catholic  '  tone  of  the  Epistle,  might 
also  be  explained  by  supposing  that  he  was  himself  an 
inhabitant  of  Asia  Minor,  more  especially  interested  in  the 
brethren  of  his  own  immediate  neighbourhood. 

5.  The  question  remains,  for  what  reasons  this  Christian, 
who  has  left  behind  in  1.  Peter  such  a  valuable  memorial  of 
his  'fulness,  simplicity  and  truth,'  assumed  the  mask  of  Peter 
—a  man  who  had  died  twenty  or  thirty  years  before.  If 
Silvanus  were  the  author  we  could  find  no  answer  to  this 
question.  Harnack  avoids  the  question  by  a  bold  hypothesis  : 
he  doubts  whether  the  primitive  document  was  originally 
a  letter  at  all ;  he  thinks  that  the  writer  was  some  prominent 
teacher  and  confessor  of  about  the  year  90,  at  the  latest,  but 
that  he  had  no  intention  of  pretending  to  be  Peter ;  that 
another  man,  probably  the  author  of  2.  Peter,  invented  the 
beginning  and  end  of  the  Epistle 2  in  order  to  give  the  docu- 
ment the  stamp  of  an  Apostolic  letter.  Before  the  reference  in 
2.  Peter  iii.  1,  he  contends,  no  one  had  quoted  a  word  from  1.  Peter 
as  Petrine  ;  the  address  and  conclusion,  moreover,  can  easily 
be  detached  from  the  whole,  and  contain  difficulties  which  can 
best  be  explained  on  the  hypothesis  that  they  were  added  later 
on.  But,  in  any  case,  we  should  not  expect  to  find  the  author 

1  iv.  15.  2  i.  1  fol.  and  v.  12-14. 


AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  in. 

expressly  named  in  such  quotations  before  the  end  of  the  second 
century  ;  the  document,  moreover,  bears  the  character  of  an 
epistle  stamped  in  every  line,1  and  therefore  must  have  pos- 
sessed an  address  from  the  very  beginning.  There  would  surely 
be  something  almost  miraculous,  too,  in  the  complete  and 
sudden  success  of  the  false  address  which,  according  to 
Harnack,  supplanted  it  after  the  year  150.  Moreover,  the 
beginning  and  end  appear  to  me  to  agree  just  as  excellently 
with  the  rest  of  1.  Peter  as  they  differ  from  the  bombastic 
style  of  2.  Peter.  The  man  who  forged  the  first  and  second 
verses  of  the  first  chapter  would  have  united  the  principal 
points  of  the  Epistle  in  short  formulae  with  a  truly  masterly 
hand  ;  for,  with  the  exception  of  the  name,  everything  which 
he  there  presents  has  its  definite  parallel  in  the  Epistle : 
in  i.  2,  for  instance,  we  find  a  most  skilful  grouping,  (1)  of 
the  foundation  of  our  salvation — predestination  by  the  Father  ; 
(2)  of  the  means  by  which  it  is  accomplished — sanctification 
by  the  Holy  Ghost ;  and  (3)  of  its  end  and  aim— obedience 
and  purification  through  the  blood  of  Christ.  Nor  will  the 
concluding  verses  present  any  difficulties  unless  we  consider 
that  the  body  of  the  Epistle  indicates  a  different  personality 
from  that  of  Peter.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  author  there 
keeps  himself  almost  entirely  in  the  background,  but  where,  as 
here,  he  does  speak  of  himself 2  everything  is  perfectly  appli- 
cable to  Peter ;  even  if  we  follow  Harnack  in  thinking  that  a 
'  witness  of  the  sufferings  of  Christ '  does  not  indicate  the 
disciple  who  followed  his  master  into  the  palace  of  the  High 
Priest  when  all  the  rest  had  fled,  we  must  allow  that  it  is  the 
most  perfect  characterisation  of  the  witness  tear'  ef o^?;r,  who 
imitated  his  master  even  to  his  death  on  the  Cross,  and  that 
the  close  of  verse  v.  1  sounds  like  a  reference  to  Matt.  xix.  28. 
If  a  Roman  Christian  of  about  the  year  100  wished  to  issue 
such  a  letter  of  consolation  to  his  fellow-Christians  under  an 
Apostolic  title,  of  the  two  Apostles  of  Rome  Peter's  name  would 
have  seemed  to  him  the  more  suitable,  precisely  because  it 
was  he  who  had  suffered  the  more  grievously  for  his  Christi- 
anity's sake.  The  author  refrained  from  writing  an  Epistle  of 
Paul,  fearing  to  betray  too  marked  a  difference  from  the  master. 

1  i.  3  fol.  12,  ii.  13,  iv.  12,  v.  1-5,  9.  2  v.  1. 


§  16.]  THH    EPISTLE    OF    JAMES  215 

Since  Peter  was  not  sufficiently  familiar  with  Greek,  he  gave 
him  Silvanus  as  an  interpreter,1  perhaps  on  the  ground  of 
Acts  xv.  23  ;  and  it  was  possibly  his  familiarity  with  the 
tradition  that  the  Gospel  of  Mark  was  originally  founded  on 
statements  of  Peter,  which  made  him  mention  Mark  as  now 
in  his  company.  Naturally  the  Apostle  whose  eyes  were  fixed 
on  his  approaching  end  could  only  have  sent  this  letter  of 
encouragement  from  Babylon-Kome,  from  betwixt  the  lion's 
very  jaws.  Since  the  epistolary  style  of  Paul  was  our  author's 
standard  in  every  respect,  he  needed  a  few  remarks  such  as 
verses  v.  12-14  for  the  end  of  his  letter,  and  certain  very 
simple  considerations  sufficed  to  produce  them.  The  end  of 
2.  Peter,  on  the  other  hand,  shows  that  its  author  had  no 
feeling  for  such  considerations.  1.  Peter  is  one  of  the  most 
transparent  documents  in  the  New  Testament,  so  long  as  we 
can  divest  our  minds  of  modern  prejudices  in  approaching  it. 

§  16.  The  Epistle  of  James 

[Of.  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  vol.  xv.,  by  W.  Beyschlag  1898  (ed.  6) ; 
Hand-Commentar  iii.  2:  Hebrews,  1.  and  2.  Peter,  James  and 
Jude  by  H.  von  Soden,  1899  (ed.  5) ;  R  Spitta  :  '  Der  Brief  des 
Jacobus,'  in  '  Zur  Gesch.  u.  Litt.  d.  Urchristentums,'  ii.  1-239, 
1896 ;  Massebieau :  '  L'epitre  de  Jacques  est-elle  1'oeuvre  d'un 
Chretien?'  1896  (35  pp.);  Ad.  Harnack :  'Die  Chronologic  d. 
altchristl.  Litt.'  i.  485-491  (1897).] 

1.  There  is  no  definite  connection  of  thought  in  the  Epistle 
of  James :  it  consists  of  separate  chapters  merely  strung 
together,  and  treating  of  certain  questions  of  Christian  life 
and  feeling.  The  address  is  as  short  as  possible,  and  final 
greetings,  etc.  are  absent.  Vv.  i.  2-18  deal  with  tempta- 
tions, which  are  declared  to  be  salutary  if  they  drive  the 
Christian  to  prayer  and  strengthen  his  humility  and  his  trust 
in  God.  Here  are  described  the  different  relations  towards 
temptation  of  God  and  of  man's  sinful  lusts — from  God  we  can 
receive  nothing  but  good.  The  next  passage  2  warns  us  to 
be  doers  of  the  word  of  God  after  hearing  it  diligently :  this 
chiefly  by  curbing  anger,  bridling  the  tongue  and  practising 

1  v.  12.  2  i.  19-27. 


216      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  m. 

mercy.1  Next  we  are  told  that  this  mercy,  the  omission  of 
which  was  counted  a  transgression  of  the  Law  before  God  as 
much  as  adultery  or  murder,  was  denied  by  the  frequent 
disregard  of  the  poor  and  the  servile  preference  shown  to  the 
rich.  No  one,  under  any  circumstances,  was  freed  from  the  duty 
of  loving  his  neighbour  as  himself.  Yes,  a  man  must  have 
works :  faith  alone  was  of  no  use.  Faith  without  works  was  dead 
in  itself,  as  the  stories  of  Abraham  and  Rahab  proved.-  Vv.  iii. 
1-12  are  an  attack  upon  the  sins  of  the  tongue,  while  the 
next  passage 3  rebukes  the  love  of  quarrelling,  the  worldliness 
and  the  tendency  to  fault-finding  nourished  by  the  pride  of 
wisdom.  In  iv.  13-17  we  are  called  upon  never  to  speak 
of  our  plans  for  future  events  without  a  pious  '  If  the 
Lord  will,'  and  in  the  next  passage  4  we  have  a  comparison 
between  the  rich  man  going  towards  a  terrible  judgment  and 
the  poor  man  encouraged  to  wait  in  patience  by  the  consoling 
thought  of  the  approaching  Parusia.  Verse  v.  12  commands 
us  to  refrain  from  swearing,  and  the  Epistle  ends  with  various 
directions  concerning  prayer,  the  confession  of  sins  and  the 
treatment  of  the  sick  and  of  those  who  had  erred  from  the 
truth. 

2.  In  so  far  as  there  is  any  connection  to  be  found 
between  these  separate  sections,  it  is  furnished  by  acci- 
dental associations  of  ideas.  The  mention  in  i.  18,  for 
instance,  of  the  '  word  of  truth  '  forms  the  connection  to 
vv.  19  and  23,  where  the  hearing  and  then  the  performance 
of  this  word  are  insisted  on.  In  like  manner  the  charge  to 
visit  '  the  fatherless  and  widows  '  calls  forth  the  first  apo- 
strophe against  the  rich,5  which  is  continued  in  a  yet  sterner 
tone  and  after  many  digressions  in  v.  1— again  by  mere 
accident.  And  how  easily  the  author  allows  himself  to  be 
led  away  from  his  subject  by  a  subordinate  idea  may  be  seen 
even  within  the  sections,  e.g.  in  i.  5-11,  where  he  completely 
loses  sight  of  the  theme  of  temptation  and  speaks  of  lack  of 
wisdom,  of  the  doubt  which  paralyses  the  force  of  prayer,  and 
of  the  glory  of  the  brother  of  low  degree  as  opposed  to  that  of 
the  rich  man.  As  in  the  Old  Testament  '  Books  of  Proverbs  ' 

1  ii.  1-13.  "  ii.  14-26.  s  iii.  13-iv.  12. 

«  v.  1-11.  3  Chap.  ii. 


§  16.]  TI1K     KIMSTLK    <>!•     .1. \.MKS  217 

and  the  Greek  gnomic  literature,  the  sentences  are  strung 
together  like  beads ;  the  scarcity  of  connecting  particles  in 
the  Epistle '  is  not  a  sign  of  awkwardness  of  style  on  the  part 
of  the  author,  but  is  on  the  contrary  quite  in  keeping  with 
the  character  of  the  Epistle.  We  might  point  to  the 
*  discourses '  of  Jesus  arranged  by  Matthew  2  as  a  parallel 
case,  for  there  too  we  are  frequently  met  by  these  unexpected 
transitions  of  thought,  and  accordingly  there  are  many  who 
would  represent  this  Epistle  as  a  similar  collection  of  sayings 
for  the  most  part  already  in  existence.  This  supposition  ac- 
quires much  weight  from  such  considerations  as  are  suggested, 
for  instance,  by  vv.  i.  2-18,  where  'temptation'  evidently 
means  something  quite  different  at  the  beginning  of  the 
passage  from  what  it  does  at  the  end  ;  for  we  cannot  seriously 
suppose  that  what  we  are  told  to  '  count  pure  joy  '  in  verse  2 3 
is  the  same  thing  as  what  in  verse  14  is  declared  to 
represent  the  enticement  and  seduction  of  our  own  evil  lusts. 
Sentences  like  '  Every  good  gift  and  every  perfect  boon  is 
from  above,'  and  many  others,4  have  the  ring  of  well-worn 
phrases,  and  the  curious  '  but '  which  connects  the  second 
part  of  verse  19  5  with  the  first G  is  best  explained  by  sup- 
posing that  the  former  was  taken  over  without  reflection 
from  some  written  source  where  it  had  stood  in  a  different 
context. 

But  still  the  Epistle  of  James  is  certainly  not  a  mere 
compilation,  in  which  the  author's  only  task  would  have 
been  one  of  selection.  Vv.  ii.  14-26  were  surely  not 
copied  from  any  other  source,  any  more  than  ii.  1-7  or  iv. 
13-16.  But  the  rest  of  the  Epistle  fits  in  completely  both  in 
tone  and  phraseology  with  these  passages  ;  the  author  writes 
tolerable  Greek  throughout ;  he  is  master  of  the  language, 
and  can  form  word-plays  like  SiSKpiO^re  .  .  .  /cpiral,7  or 
fyaivoiievr)  .  .  .  a(f)ai>^o/jLs^rj 8  (that  of  iii.  9  is  the  most  skilful, 
and  betrays  an  acquaintance  with  Greek  literature),  while  he 
even  ventures  on  a  sort  of  oxymoron  in  the  sentence  '  let  the 

1  E.g.,  i.  12,  13,  16,  17,  18,  19,  26,  27,  and  v.  1-6. 

2  E.g.,  Matt.  vii.  3  Cf.  12.  4  i.  12,  13,  19b,  20,  27. 
5  '  But  let  every  man  be  swift  to  hear,'  etc. 

•  '  Know  ye  this,  my  beloved  brethren.'  7  ii.  4.  8  iv.  14. 


218     AX    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  in. 

rich  man  glory  in  that  he  is  made  low.' '  His  fondness  for 
expressing  himself  in  vivid  figures,2  his  employment,  for 
didactic  purposes,  of  similes  from  nature  and  from  daily 
life,3  and  of  historical  examples,4  all  form  part  of  his  own 
individuality.  In  this  so-called  Epistle  we  are  shown, 
not  only  the  stability  of  an  unerring  taste  in  the  collec- 
tion of  extraneous  material,  but  the  consistency  of  a  literary 
personality ;  and  the  countless  reminiscences  of  other  litera- 
tures on  which  we  stumble  must  be  explained  by  the 
assumption  that  in  its  composition  the  author  allowed  himself 
to  be  greatly  influenced  by  the  rich  stores  of  wisdom  treasured 
in  his  memory  :  actually,  no  doubt,  he  offers  old  and  new 
together,  but  the  form  in  which  it  stands  is  all  his  own  mental 
property.  In  this  respect  he  stands  no  lower  than  Paul  or 
the  author  of  Hebrews,  but  the  space  which  these  would  give 
to  Old  Testament  quotations  is  filled  by  him  with  maxims  and 
concise  formulations  of  his  own  religious  and  moral  ex- 
perience. 

In  a  composition  of  this  kind  there  can  obviously  be  no 
question  of  a  consistent  thesis.  To  impress  upon  his  readers 
a  quantity  of  sound  precepts  for  a  truly  Christian  life  is  the 
object  for  which  the  Epistle  was  written.  That  the  author 
makes  use  of  54  imperatives  in  108  verses  is  a  sufficient  sign 
of  his  intention :  he  delivers  a  kind  of  sermon  of  repentance. 
He  does  not  wish  to  impart  new  wisdom,  or  to  refute  heretical 
doctrines,  but  simply  to  unmask  the  secularisation  which  had 
already  met  him  in  so  many  different  forms,  to  hold  a  mirror 5 
to  his  brethren,  that  they  might  see  their  sorry  figures 
and  be  lastingly  ashamed.  Even  the  passage  concerning 
faith  and  works  *  is  no  exception  to  this  rule — much  less  does 
it  form  the  kernel  of  the  Epistle — for  it  is  merely  intended  to 
stir  up  those  lax  and  indolent  members  of  the  community 
who  glossed  over  their  disinclination  to  active  works  of  love 
by  pointing  to  their  faultless  faith.  The  writer  represents 
things  as  he  unfortunately  saw  them  everywhere,  and 
measures  them  against  his  own  ideal  of  piety  without 

1  i.  10.  2  E.g.,  i.  14  fol.  and  25. 

1  i.  6,  10  fol.,  23  fol.,  iii.  4  fol.,  11  fol. 

4  ii.  21,  25,  v.  11,  17  fol.  6  i.  23  fol.  *  ii.  14-26. 


§  16.]  THE   EPISTLE   OF   JAMES  219 

completeness  either  in  blame  or  exhortation,  but  still  in  the 
hope  of  being  able  to  rouse  men's  consciences  with  regard  to 
some  particularly  important  points,  which  he  believed  were 
somewhat  overlooked  in  the  ordinary  preaching  to  the 
churches. 

8.  According  to  the  opening  verse,  James  was  written  for 
the  '  twelve  tribes  which  are  of  the  dispersion/  and  the  most 
obvious  interpretation  of  the  words  would  point  to  the  Jewish 
Christians  of  countries  outside  Palestine,  for  the  author 
certainly  wrote  to  fellow-Christians :  nothing  in  the  Epistle 
reads  like  an  appeal  of  James  to  unbelieving  countrymen  to 
submit  to  the  word  of  truth.  But  the  readers  are  thought  of 
as  living  in  organised  communities  l  ;  and  where  and  till  when 
did  any  purely  Jewish  Christian  communities  exist  in  the 
Dispersion  ?  Not  a  single  word  in  the  Epistle  indicates 
readers  of  Jewish  origin,  for  it  would  be  preposterous  to  see  in 
the  '  rich  '  of  chaps,  ii.  and  v.  a  portrait  of  the  fat,  usurious, 
arrogant  Jews,  while  the  word  '  Synagogue  '  -  as  applied 
to  the  general  assembly  of  the  addressees,  does  not  imply 
a  Jewish  origin  any  more  than  does  the  ETricrwaywyri  of 
Hebrews  x.  25  :  it  was  the  most  appropriate  Greek  term 
for  describing  the  religious  assemblies  even  of  Gentiles,  and 
of  Gentile  Christians  down  to  a  much  later  time.  No- 
where is  any  national  prejudice  alluded  to,  and  thus  it 
seems  best  to  interpret  the  address  in  the  same  way  as  that 
of  1.  Peter;  the  twelve  tribes  are  God's  people,3  and  God's 
people,  ever  since  the  saving  work  of  Christ,  consisted  of  all 
believers  who,  though  verily  '  of  the  dispersion,'  were  to  be 
found  on  earth. 

The  Epistle,  then,  fixes  its  horizon  at  the  farthest  possible 
point :  it  is  an  appeal  to  the  whole  of  Christendom.  And 
indeed  we  should  have  taken  it  for  a  truly  Catholic  Epistle 
even  if  it  had  had  no  address  at  all.  It  was  given  to  the  world 
as  a  literary  work,  not  sent  round  by  messengers  to  a  definite 
circle  of  readers.  The  numerous  appeals  which  it  contains  to 
'  brethren,'  '  my  brethren,'  *  my  beloved  brethren  '  are  just  as 
rhetorical  as  the  words  of  ii.  20, '  0  vain  man.'  There  is  never 
any  reference  to  the  special  circumstances  of  an  individual 

1  v.  14.  2  ii.  2.  s  1.  Peter  ii.  10. 


220     AX    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  in. 

community,  nor  does  any  personal  intercourse  take  place 
between  writer  and  readers  ;  of  the  epistolary  form,  in  fact, 
only  a  faint  shadow  is  preserved. 

4.  According  to  the  superscription,  the  author  is  '  James, 
a  servant  of  God  and  of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ.' 1  The  mere 
fact  that  the  title  of  Apostle  is  wanting  forbids  us  to  think  of 
James  the  son  of  Zebedee  or  James  the  son  of  Alphseus,  but 
the  former  was  executed  at  an  early  date,2  and  the  latter  dis- 
appears from  the  scene  after  the  Ascension.3  All  the  greater 
however,  was  the  part  played  in  Jerusalem  by  James  the 
brother  of  the  Lord,4  whom  Paul  mentions  in  Galatians 5  as 
one  of  the  '  pillars,'  naming  him  actually  before  Cephas  and 
John.  Even  Josephus  took  an  interest  in  him,  and  in  about 
the  year  180  Hegesippus  6  drew  up  a  minute  account  of  his 
personality.  It  may  safely  be  assumed  that  he  fell  a  victim  to 
Jewish  hatred  before  the  outbreak  of  the  Jewish  war.  And  it 
is  to  him  that,  as  far  as  they  express  an  opinion  on  the  subject, 
the  Greek  Fathers  unanimously  ascribed  our  Epistle.  His 
right  to  address  the  whole  of  Christendom  could  not  be  disputed : 
he  was  the  James  /car'  s^o^v,  who  did  not  need  to  present 
himself  under  any  title,  while  the  fact  that  he  did  not  make 
a  special  boast  of  his  relationship  to  Jesus  in  the  opening 
verse  aroused  no  wonder,  but  rather  passed  for  tactfulness. 

At  first  sight  there  seems  to  be  a  good  deal  of  evidence  in 
favour  of  the  view  that  this  '  First  Bishop  of  Jerusalem '  was 
really  the  author  of  our  Epistle.  A  thoroughly  practical,  con- 
servative disposition,  as  we  find  it  displayed  in  the  Epistle, 
must  surely  have  been  his  characteristic ;  he  was  a  foe  to 
many  words,  and  easily  inclined  to  treat  poverty  as  a  virtue 
without  more  ado.  The  tone  of  the  Epistle  bears  a  certain 
resemblance  to  that  of  the  discourses  of  Jesus  in  Matthew,  and 
points  of  contact  with  the  Gospels  are  more  numerous  here 
than  in  any  other  Epistle  of  the  New  Testament.  We  might 
also  attribute  the  use  of  the  Wisdom  of  Jesus  the  son  of 
Sirach  and  of  the  Wisdom  of  Solomon  to  a  Palestinian 
Christian  of  that  period,  if  we  could  believe  that  those  books 

1  Cf.  Jude  i.,  Philip,  i.  1.  2  Acts  xii.  '2.  *  Acts  i.  13. 

4  Gal.  i.  19.  4  Gal.  ii.  9. 

•  Eusebius,  Hist.  Eccles.  ii.  23. 


§  16.]  Till-:    KPISTLE    OF    JAMKS  221 

were  still  or  already  in  circulation  in  the  Palestinian  tongue. 
Nevertheless,  the  arguments  against  authenticity  are  far  too 
powerful  and  numerous  to  leave  room  for  the  slightest  doubt 
on  the  subject.  First,  how  could  the  son  of  a  Nazarene 
carpenter  have  attained  such  fluency  in  the  Greek  tongue  as 
is  here  displayed  ] — a  fluency  which,  as  in  the  case  of  Hebrews, 
absolutely  excludes  the  hypothesis  that  what  we  possess  is  a 
translation  from  an  Aramaic  original  ?  The  explanation  that 
he  did  not  acquire  his  fluency  in  the  use  of  Greek  in  the 
school  of  a  rhetorician  but  in  his  daily  life  is  more  than 
naive,  in  view  of  the  rhetorical  character  of  the  Epistle  of 
James ;  but  he  who  considers  it  natural  that  James  should 
have  followed  the  Septuagint  when  he  wrote  in  Greek,  may 
certainly,  if  he  likes,  define  his  relation  to  the  Greek  tongue 
as  '  not  particularly  awkward.'  As  to  his  use  of  the  Sep- 
tuagint, how  could  one  who  had  grown  up  to  manhood 
with  his  Hebrew  Bible  by  any  possibility  use  the  former, 
especially  to  the  extent  here  noticeable  ?  For  readers  in 
a  position  to  judge,  the  fact  is  established  that  Greek  was  the 
writer's  native  tongue,  or  one  of  them  at  least. 

Secondly,  how  could  that  strict  upholder  of  the  Law,  before 
whom  Peter  did  not  dare  to  defend  the  practice  of  sitting  down 
to  meat  with  Gentile  Christians,2  have  composed  an  epistle  in 
which  the  necessity  of  observing  the  Ceremonial  Law  no  longer 
comes  under  discussion,  in  which  religion  is  said  to  consist  in 
morality  of  conduct,3  which  speaks  with  enthusiasm  of  the '  per- 
fect law,  the  law  of  liberty,' 4  culminating  in  the  royal  com- 
mand to  love  one's  neighbour5 — and  the  author  of  which  must 
therefore  have  regarded  the  old  Law  as  imperfect  and  as  a  law 
of  bondage  ?  Harnack  makes  the  very  apposite  remark  that 
the  acceptance  of  such  a  theory  would  force  us  to  believe  that 
history  had  repeated  itself  in  the  strangest  manner,  for  in  this 
case  a  '  Christianity '  such  as  that  of  Hennas,  Clement  and 
Justin  must  already  have  flourished  between  the  years  31  and 
50,  and  Paul's  appearance  would  then  have  been  a  sort  of  super- 
fluous intervention — only  not  calculated  this  time  to  make  sin 
greater,  but  to  leave  the  good  in  a  more  precarious  condition. 

1  See  pp.  217  fol.  -  Gal.  ii.  12.  :<  i.  27. 

4  i.  25,  ii.  12.  s  ii.  8. 


222     AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  in. 

And,   thirdly,   the    passage    in   chap.   ii.   vv.    14-26,   is 
wholly  inconceivable  as  coming  from  the  mouth  of  James  in 
the  last   years   of   his   life.     The  writer   here   disputes   the 
doctrine   that  man   can   be  justified  by  faith  alone  without 
works  (note  that  he  says  justified,  not,  according  to  the  Gospel, 
saved) :  such  a  lifeless  faith,  he  urges,  could  be  of  no  use,  and 
even  devils  possessed  it.     Now,  Paul  had  taught  justification 
••  by  faith  alone,  and  James  ii.  24  is  simply  the  contradiction 
of  Paul's  words  in  Romans  iii.  28  ;  as  James  ii.   23  is  an 
attempt  to  wrest  from  Paul  his  chief  authority,  Gen.xv.  6,  as  to 
the  faith  of  Abraham.     That  the  one  passage  should  be  inde- 
pendent of  the  other  is  out  of  the  question,  still  more  so  that 
James  should  have  opened  the  dispute  and  that  Paul  should 
only  have  set  up  his  theses  out  of  opposition  to  him.1     No, 
the  Epistle  is  directed  against  a  formula  which  had  long  been 
used  to  gloss  over  moral  unfruitfulness,  and  to  detach  this  from 
its  connection  with  Paul  is  to  represent  things  as  they  are  not. 
The  hypothesis  which  seeks  to  regard  James  as  the  oldest 
New  Testament  Epistle,  dating   back   from   the   thirties   or 
forties  or  the  beginning  of  51,  is  almost  more  grotesque  than 
the  assignment  of  1.  Peter  to  a  date  previous  to  the  chief 
Pauline  Epistles,  for  a  declaration  concerning  faith  and  works 
as  conditions  of  salvation  could  not  possibly  have  been  made 
before  the  historic  and   far-reaching  activity  of  Paul ;  and, 
moreover,  this  assignment  was  evidently  prompted  merely  by 
the  wish  not  to  be  obliged  to  admit  an  antagonism  between 
Paul  and  James. 

Now,  it  is  certainly  possible  that  in  the  last  years  of  his 
life  James  had  heard  with  sorrow  of  the  suspicious  teachings 
of  the  Apostle  of  the  Gentiles ;  it  is  conceivable — although 
certainly  not  very  likely — that  copies  of  those  very  Pauline 
Epistles  had  reached  him  from  which  the  formulae  of  James 
ii.  20  etc.  are  taken  ;  but  could  he  in  such  a  life-and- 
death  struggle  have  contented  himself  with  a  few  superficial 
objections,  while  he  suffered  the  really  important  point — that 
of  the  observance  of  the  Ceremonial  Law — to  pass  by  him  in 
silence?  In  the  Apostolic  Age,  or  at  least  in  Jerusalem 
among  the  leading  spirits,  so  foolish  a  misunderstanding 
1  Cf.  James  ii.  14,  16,  and  18-20. 


§  16.]  Till:    K1MSTLK    OF    JAMES  223 

of  the  Pauline  thesis  is  inconceivable.  For  *  faith '  in 
James  ii.  14  etc.  is  a  belief  in  fact,  which  even  the  devils 
could  attain  to  ;  whereas  with  Paul  it  means  a  grateful  submis- 
sion to  the  saving  will  of  God,  as  revealed  in  the  crucified  and 
risen  Christ,  and  an  inner  union  with  Christ— a  thing  which 
naturally  was  only  accessible  to  believers.  And  so,  too,  the 
'  works  '  which  Paul  rejects  are  the  works  of  the  Law,  which 
Christ  had  abrogated ;  those  which  James  demands,  on  the 
other  hand,  are  the  fruits  of  faith  such  as  even  under  Paul's 
system  would  not  and  could  not  have  been  omitted— 
the  'reasonable  service,'  in  fact,  of  Romans  xii.  1.  As  far  as 
the  practical  consequences  are  concerned,  the  author  of 
James  ii.  stands  on  an  equal  footing  with  Paul ;  he  will  not 
allow  faith  to  count  as  a  comfortable  excuse  for  moral  in- 
difference, but  demands  some  proof  of  faith.  This  is  precisely 
the  case  with  Paul,  except  thatTie  does  not  recognise  as  faith 
what  remains  without  fruit.  Now,  this  misunderstanding  of 
Pauline  expressions  would  be  quite  intelligible  at  some  later 
time,  when  nothing  was  known  of  the  rule  of  the  Jewish  Law, 
and  the  '  works  of  the  Law  '  were  looked  upon  merely  as  moral 
actions  :  a  man  of  such  a  time  might  have  written  James 
ii.  14-26  not  as  a  disguised  attempt  to  brand  Paul  as  a  heretic, 
but  rather  as  a  correct  interpretation  of  his  words.1  In  his  eyes 
the  Apostle  could  not  have  meant  to  encourage  this  easy-going 
younger  generation,  which  imagined  itself  certain  of  heaven  for 
its  mere  orthodoxy,  and  therefore  he  seeks  to  point  out,  with 
as  close  a  connection  as  possible  with  Paul's  words,  how  both 
faith  and  works  could  best  be  accorded  their  due.  The 
'  vain  man '  whom  he  indignantly  apostrophises  in  ii.  20  is 
not  Paul,  but  someone  who  interprets  Paul  in  this  false  and 
dangerous  way.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  James  the  Just  had 
written  this  passage  about  the  year  60  or  61,  the  enemy 
against  whom  he  contended  could  not  have  been  a  misrepre- 
senter  of  Paul's  teaching,  but  simply  Paul  himself,  and  the 
arguments  employed  against  him,  which  could  not  then  be 
palliated  on  the  saving  ground  of  incomplete  knowledge,  would 
in  their  conscious  distortion  of  the  case  be  as  contemptible 
and  cowardly  as  they  were  futile.  Lastly,  we  may  now  add 

1  Cf.  2.  Peter  iii.  16. 


224     AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  in. 

to  these  arguments  against   the   authorship   of   James   the 
positive  tokens  of  a  later  time. 

5.  If  the  Epistle  of  James  had  come  down  to  us  unnamed, 
its  assignment  to  the   second   century — say,   to   the   period 
between  125   and  150 — would  commend  itself  on  the  most 
diverse  grounds.     It  has  a  considerable  literature  behind  it — 
not  only  Old  Testament  Apocrypha,  but  Christian  writings  also  : 
Paul,  Hebrews,  1.  Peter  '  and  the  Gospels.    The  points  of  resem- 
blance, too,  between  it  and  the  first  Epistle  of  Clement  are  so 
many  and  so  striking  that  it  is  impossible  to  explain  them 
satisfactorily  except  by  supposing  our  author  to  have  been 
acquainted  with  that  Epistle.     James  shares  its  fundamental 
ideas  with  those  of  the  Shepherd  of  Hernias,  and  even  in  expres- 
sion it  often  approaches  the  latter  remarkably  closely — though 
what  is  there   expressed  in   broad   and   commonplace   form 
here  becomes  more  refined.    Unfortunately,  however,  the  data 
are  not  forthcoming  by  which  to  prove  the  employment  of 
the  one  by  the  other,  and  when  we  have  no  actual  quotations 
to  deal  with,  mere  arguments  about  literary  obligations  are 
unsupported  and  futile.    The  determined  opponent  turns  them 
round  :  according  to  Zahn,  it  was  the  study  of  James  ii.  14fol. 
which  moved  Paul  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans 2  to  make  an 
exposition  of  the  subject,  founded  on  Genesis  xv.  6,  incom- 
parably more  thoroughgoing  than  his  former  utterances  in 
Galatians 3 ;  and  in  writing  the  Epistle  Paul  did  well,  he  adds, 
to  take  James's  methods  of  instruction  into  consideration,  since 
the  Christians  of  Rome  were  already  accustomed  to  them  ! 
Still  less  telling  is  the  reference  to  the  much-oppressed  con- 
dition of  the  Christians,  as  described  in  chaps,  i.  and  v.  ; 
surely  verse  ii.  7  (  '  Do  not  they  blaspheme   the  honourable 
name  by  the  which  ye  are  called  ? '),  coming  after  verse  (5, 
points  to  a  time  in  which  the  Christians  were  persecuted  for 
their  Christianity's  sake4;  when  even  fellow-believers  appear 
not  seldom  to  have  denounced  one  another. 

Further,  the  state  of  the  communities  both  as  to  morals 
and  religion  seems  to  have  degenerated   more   considerably 

1  Cp.  James  iv.  6  fol.  with  1.  Peter  v.  5  fol.,  and  James  i.  18,  21  with 
1.  Peter  i.  23  ii.  •_>. 

a  iv.  3-24.  '  iii.  5-7.  4  Cf.  1.  Peter  iv.  1C. 


§16.]  T1IK    EPISTLE    OF    ,1AM  MS  225 

than  we  should  have  thought  it  possible  before  the  time  of 
Hermas.  Universal  indifference  had  established  itself  in  the 
Church,  and  men  sought  shamelessly  to  excuse  their  vices  and 
their  laxity  on  the  pretext  that  the  temptations  to  which 
they  were  subjected  came  from  God,1  or  that  since  they 
possessed  faith,  that  was  enough  for  salvation.-  A  long  time 
must  have  passed  before  Paul's  doctrine  of  '  faith  alone '  could 
have  been  so  boldly  misapplied,  and  in  a  Church  the  majority 
of  whose  members  set  themselves  so  low  a  standard  ;i  re- 
action like  that  of  Montanism  (which  began  about  155  A.D.) 
could  not  have  been  far  off.  But  the  main  point  is  that  the 
writer's  whole  attitude,  his  theological  position,  take  us,  when 
compared  with  the  interests  and  ideas  of  the  Apostolic  age, 
into  a  totally  different  world.  Christ  is  scarcely  mentioned  at 
all,  and  when  he  is,  it  is  only  as  the  longed-for  Judge  ;  the 
Messianic  idea  has  entirely  disappeared,  and  faith  now 
consists  half  in  knowing,3  and  half  in  remaining  steadfast.4 
The  Epistle  speaks  of  the  Law  entirely  in  the  manner  of  the 
second  century,  with  its  enthusiasm  for  the  'nova  lex.' 
Eeligion  has  lost  the  sharp,  decisive  features  of  the  early 
times  ;  practically  nothing  is  left  of  it  now  but  generalities — 
on  the  one  hand  a  firm  trust  in  God's  goodness,  expressed  in 
prayer  and  never  losing  hope,  and  on  the  other  a  zealous  fulfil- 
ment of  God's  commands,  an  exercise  of  pure  piety  as  defined 
in  verse  i.  27.  The  author  does  not  fight  for  Christ,  for  faith, 
for  hope,  but  for  conduct,  for  uprightness,  for  self-discipline ;  it 
is  not  his  part  to  found  and  increase  a  Church  in  defiance  of 
the  world,  but  to  drive  the  world  out  of  the  Church.  On  the 
face  of  it  the  Epistle  of  James  declares  itself,  in  spite  of  its 
earnestly  religious  character,  to  be  perhaps  the  least  Christian 
book  of  the  New  Testament — hence  its  want  of  attraction  for 
Luther — and  can  it  be  that  such  a  document  belongs  to  the 
earliest  Christian  times  ? 

With  this  assignment  of  the  Epistle  to  so  late  a  date,  we  may 
perhaps  feel  the  absence  of  some  reference  to  heretical  troubles. 
Verse  i.  17  can  scarcely  have  been  spoken  with  an  anti-Gnostic 
purpose,  but  vv.  iii.  1  fol.  '  be  not  many  teachers  '  (the  very 
opposite  of  Hebrews  v.  12)  and  iii.  13 1  fol.  show  that  there 

1  i.  13.  2  ii.  14.  3  ii.  14  fol.  *  i.  6. 

Q 


226        AN   INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT  [CHAP.  m. 

was  no  lack  of  vexatious  tendencies  of  the  kind  at  the  time  of 
our  Epistle.  Its  author,  however,  did  not  look  upon  gruch 
wranglings  as  the  main  evil,  or  rather  he  did  not  expect  much 
success  from  controversy  with  these  fluent  disputants.  To 
conclude  from  his  silence  as  to  Gnostic  seducers  that  he  knew 
of  none,  would  be  just  as  wise  as  to  conclude  that  because  he 
gives  no  warning  against  sins  of  impurity  there  were  no 
harlots  and  adulterers  among  his  readers,  and  therefore  that 
he  could  not  be  addressing  Gentile  Christian  communities  \ 
He  wished  neither  to  draw  up  a  complete  list  of  require- 
ments, nor  a  manual  for  inexperienced  *  teachers,'  but  to  offer 
*  some  spiritual  gift '  for  the  edification  of  the  Church  ;  but 
all  his  observations  led  him  to  the  conclusion  that  the 
Church  of  that  time  was  lacking  in  moral  energy,  and  he 
thought  that  if  this  lack  were  supplied  the  other  evils  would 
vanish  of  themselves.  A  blameless  life  he  regarded  as  the 
test  of  the  possession  of  truth  and  purity  of  faith.  Perhaps, 
too,  the  split  between  the  Church  and  the  heretics  had  become 
wider  by  his  time,  so  that  as  he  had  nothing  to  do  with 
those  outside,  he  was  obliged  to  content  himself  with  holding 
up  a  mirror  to  his  own  party,  with  its  conceited  orthodoxy,  in 
order  to  draw  its  attention  to  the  many  blots  with  which  it 
was  still  disfigured.  Nor  had  Gnosticism  appeared  every- 
where in  equal  strength,  and  where  our  Epistle  was  written 
we  do  not  know.  Many  opinions  favour  Kome,  but  con- 
nections with  Kome  can  be  discovered  in  every  document  of 
uncertain  origin  of  about  this  date,  and  Rome  was  certainly 
not  the  sole  producer — scarcely  even  the  most  distinguished 
— of  this  form  of  literature. 

But  we  have  no  grounds  at  all  for  fixing  upon  Palestinian 
soil  and  Jewish-Christian  surroundings  as  the  source  of  the 
Epistle  of  James.  There  is  even  less  of  distinctively  Jewish 
character  to  be  observed  about  the  author  than  of  distinctively 
Christian  ;  his  morality  is  rather  Hellenistic  than  Palestinian, 
and  the  resemblances  to  Old  Testament  phraseology  and 
thought  in  his  Epistle  are  the  fruit  of  many  years'  study 
of  Church  literature,  in  which,  of  course,  the  Old  Testa- 
ment ranked  very  high.  His  practical  wisdom  is  of  mixed 
Jewish,  Christian  and  Pagan  origin  ;  he  was  probably  a  man  of 


§  16.]  THK    Kl'ISTLK    OF   JAMKS  227 

education,  but  sprung  from  a  family  that  had  long  been  Christian, 
and  he  wrote  under  the  name  of  James,  not  because  he  wished 
to  mark  the  antagonism  between  Paul  and  the  Jewish  Christians, 
but  probably  because  he  honoured  in  the  person  of  James 
the  first  representative  of  the  Lord  upon  earth,  and  did  not 
venture  to  imitate  Peter  or  Paul,  whose  Epistles  were  already 
in  circulation.  The  exceedingly  late  appearance  of  James  in 
the  literature  of  the  Church  '  is  also  a  strong  support  to  this 
view. 

6.  Some  have  recently  attempted  to  throw  a  fresh  light  on 
the  origin  of  James  by  assuming  the  existence  of  interpola- 
tions. In  an  investigation  useful  in  many  ways  for  the 
special  exegesis  of  this  Epistle,  Spitta  puts  forward  the 
ingenious  hypothesis  that  James  is  a  Jewish — possibly 
pre-Christian — document,  for  which  a  Christian  admirer 
wished  to  find  a  place  in  the  New  Testament,  and  therefore 
inserted  the  name  of  Christ  in  the  address  and  in  verse  ii. 
1.  And  independently  of  Spitta,  Massebieau  has  arrived 
at  a  similar  result.  There  is  much  in  ii.  1  to  make  that 
view  attractive ;  the  rest  of  the  address  in  i.  1,  however,  would 
sound  exceedingly  strange  as  a  superscription  to  an  epistle 
of  a  Jew  to  his  fellow-believers.  But  what  is  urged  against 
the  pre-Pauline  origin  of  vv.  ii.  14-26  has  just  as  much 
weight  when  directed  against  the  supposition  that  the  author 
was  a  Jew  ;  I  cannot  believe  that  a  Jew  would  write  such 
sentences  as  i.  18,  ii.  5,  7  and  iv.  4,  any  more  than  that  he 
would  take  pride  in  the  '  law  of  freedom,'  as  in  vv.  i.  25  and 
ii.  12,2  or  that  he  would  be  yearning  for  the  Parusia  of  the 
Lord.3 

There  is  nothing  in  the  Epistle  which  could  only  have  been 
said  by  a  Jew,  and  even  such  thoroughly  Christian  writings  as 
1.  Peter  contain  large  sections  which  might  as  well  have  been 
written  by  a  Jew  as  by  anyone  else.4  If  we  can  believe  that  the 
Epistle  of  James,  although  of  Jewish  origin,  gave  such  extra- 
ordinary pleasure  to  a  Christian  of  about  the  year  150  that 
he  could  not  help  changing  it  into  a  New  Testament  Scripture 

1  In  any  case  not  till  after  the  year  200. 

-  Cf.  ii.  8.  '  v.  7  fol. 

*  E.g.,  ii.  1  fol.  11-20,  iii.  1-14. 

o  2 


228       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT  [CHAP.  in. 

by  the  addition  of  a  dozen  words,  we  could  as  easily  believe 
that  a  Christian  of  that  time  might  have  produced  the  whole 
document  himself,  seeing  that  no  previous  mention  of  it 
exists.  The  one  theory  is  not  in  the  least  more  difficult  to 
accept  than  the  other. 

Harnack  sets  the  Christian  editor  another  task.  He  sug- 
gests that  a  collection  of  maxims  and  fragments  of  discourses 
which  had  been  in  circulation,  say,  since  130,  and  had  originated 
with  a  post-Apostolic  Teacher,  was,  about  the  year  200,  re- 
modelled by  an  unknown  hand  into  a  letter,  for  which  it  had 
never  been  intended,  by  the  prefixing  of  verse  i.  1,  while  at 
the  same  time  it  was  provided  with  a  great  name,  which  soon 
won  it  the  respect  due  to  a  Canonical  work.  But  Harnack's 
reasons  are  not  convincing.  To  say  that  no  one  would  write  a 
letter  like  this  document  is  an  exaggeration,  where  it  is  a  case, 
as  here,  of  a  more  or  less  skilful  adaptation  of  a  literary  form 
unsuited  to  the  object  which  the  author  had  in  view  ;  I  could 
rather  believe  that  the  Epistle  was  an  excerpt  from  an  originally 
much  longer  letter  than  a  compilation  from  the  discourses  of  the 
aforesaid  Teacher.  That  the  address  appeals,  in  a  somewhat 
artificial  manner,  to  the  whole  of  Christendom,  while  parts  at 
least  of  the  document  are  directed  to  a  perfectly  definite  and 
limited  circle,  is  a  reproach  which  would  apply  to  every  Catho- 
lic Epistle,  apart  from  any '  artificiality.'  Finally,  he  contends 
that  the  forger  nowhere  indicates  that  he  wishes  to  be  con- 
sidered as  James,  and,  therefore  that  the  so-called  Epistle 
cannot  originally  have  been  a  forgery.  Now,  I  should  have 
thought  that  the  author  made  a  claim  throughout  on  the 
obedience  of  his  readers,  and  wrote  with  the  conviction  that  he 
had  the  right  of  administering  sharp  reproof  to  them  l  ;  but 
if  we  go  in  search  of  indications  that  he  is  posing  as  James  we 
mistake  his  object  entirely.  Clearly  the  forger  neither  pre- 
fixed the  name  of  James  to  his  Epistle  nor  wrote  the  Epistle 
itself,  merely  because  he  was  determined  to  play  the  part  of 
James,  but  because  he  wished  to  secure  a  universal  hearing 
for  his  words.  This  he  secured  by  the  superscription  ;  further 
efforts  to  appear  as  James  would  imply  a  consciousness  of  the 
danger  and  untruthfulness  of  such  literary  fictions,  and  a  fear 

1  We  need  only  note  verses  v.  12-14  fol. 


§  17.]  THE   EPISTLE    OF   JUDE  229 

of  the  critical  mistrust  of  his  readers,  both  of  them  feelings 
as  foreign  to  the  writers  of  that  day  as  they  would  be  unavoid- 
able to  those  of  ours. 

§  17.    The  Epistle  of  Jude 
[Cf.  the  works  mentioned  in  §  18.] 

This  Epistle  contains  but  a  single  section,  besides  its 
address  and  greeting  and  its  doxological  ending.  The  author 
begs  his  readers  bravely  to  shield  the  faith  delivered  to 
them,  against  those  who  had  the  appearance  of  Christians 
but  who  nevertheless  shamelessly  denied  the  Lord.1  He 
then  reminds  them  briefly  -  of  the  punishments  which  had 
lighted  upon  similar  offenders  in  the  past,  and  this  leads  up 
to  a  description  of  the  audacious  dreamers  of  to-day,  who 
went  astray  from  the  truth  and  destroyed  the  foundations  of 
faith,3  and  to  an  exhortation  to  keep  the  right  course  in  the 
face  of  these  dangers.4 

The  Epistle  purports  to  be  written  by  one  Judas,  brother 
of  James.  Now,  this  cannot  be  the  Apostle  *  Judas  the  son  of 
James,'  of  whom  we  hear  in  Luke  and  the  Acts,5  because, 
although  the  name  of  his  father  is  mentioned,  nothing  is  said 
of  any  brother ;  but  since  the  addition  evidently  presupposes 
that  this  brother  James  was  a  distinguished  personage,  we 
are  obliged  to  turn  to  that  James  who  was  the  brother  of  Jesus 
and  the  pretended  author  of  the  Epistle  of  James.  But  then 
Judas  must  also  have  been  a  brother  of  Jesus — a  point  upon 
which  he  might  have  kept  silence  out  of  respect G — and  accord- 
ing to  Matt.  xiii.  55  and  Mark  vi.  3  there  actually  was  such  a 
person.  The  addressees  are  all  those  '  that  are  called  and  kept 
for  Jesus  Christ,'  and  therefore  the  circle  for  which  it  is  intended 
appears  to  have  been  just  as  '  catholic  '  as  that  of  the  Epistle  of 
James  ;  moreover,  the  epistolary  form  is  here  purely  artificial, 
as  is  proved  by  the  end.  Yet  in  itself  there  is  nothing  impos- 
sible in  the  theory  that  it  was  addressed  to  a  single  church 
or  group  of  churches,  which,  on  receiving  the  document, 

1  Vv.  3  fol.  2  Vv.  5-7.  3  Vv.  8-16. 

4  Vv.  17-23.  5  Luke  vi.  16  ;  Acts  i.  13.  6  See  p.  220. 


230      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  in. 

found  themselves  fully  enough  described  in  verse  1.  Verse  3 
appears  at  first  sight  to  suggest  that  the  author  was  in 
constant  correspondence  with  those  to  whom  he  wrote.  But 
all  individual  traits  are  wanting ;  the  word  '  beloved '  in 
vv.  3,  17  and  20  is  no  argument  to  the  contrary. 

The  sole  object  of  the  Epistle  is  to  warn  Christendom 
against  a  band  of  pseudo-Christians  whose  doctrines  were  no 
less  abominable  and  anti-Christian  than  was  their  moral 
conduct.  It  is  written  in  deep  sorrow  at  the  spread  of  such  ten- 
dencies in  the  Church,  but  it  shows  more  zeal  than  ability  in 
attacking  them ;  the  writer  allows  a  larger  space  to  his  wrath 
against  these  wretches  and  to  a  description  of  the  judgment 
awaiting  them  than  to  a  demonstration  of  the  meanness  of 
their  principles  and  practice.  Only  in  a  few  places  l  does  he 
give  any  positive  information  concerning  them — and  even 
that  is  often  no  more  than  indicated — and  the  real  refutation 
consists  entirely  in  the  assertion  2  that  through  the  oracles  of 
Prophets  and  Apostles  men  had  long  been  prepared  for  such 
phenomena.  The  style  does  not  show  any  very  striking 
facility,3  but  it  is  not  without  a  certain  pithy  vigour. 

2.  The  enemies  contended  against  in  Jude  are  not  merely 
vicious  and  weak-kneed  Christians — perhaps  such  as  had  fallen 
away  through  persecution — still  less  Jewish  revolutionaries, 
but  rather  Antinomian  Gnostics.  They  have  not  yet  left  the 
Church,4  but  on  the  contrary  practise  their  deceit  within 
it,  and  take  advantage  of  the  credulity  of  the  others  to  trade 
upon  their  visions  5  and  their  superior  wisdom.6  This  was 
precisely  why  they  were  so  dangerous.  That  they  were 
Gnostics  is,  however,  proved  by  verse  19,  for  the  separation 
of  mankind  into  different  classes,  and  the  haughty  contempt 
here  mentioned  in  which  the  'spiritual*  party  held  the 
'  psychical,'  were  distinct  characteristics  of  Gnosticism.  Verses 
8''  and  10"  can  only  mean  that  they  rejected  the  Old  Testament 
revelation  and  regarded  the  God  of  the  Old  Testament  and  his 
angels  either  as  powers  of  evil,  hostile  to  the  true  God,  or  at 
least  as  imperfect  and  as  standing  far  below  the  true  God 

1  Vv.  4,  8,  10  (12  and  16),  19,  23. 

2  Vv.  4,  14  fol.  and  17  fol.  s  E.g.,  verse  16. 

4  Verse  12.  *  Verse  8.  •  Verse  16. 


§  17.]  TIIK    KIMSTLE    OF   JUDE  233 

which  again  was  characteristic  of  Gnosticism.  Connected  with 
this,  too,  is  the  fact  that  they  enjoined  the  transgression  of 
the  Old  Testament  commandments  without  distinction  as  a 
duty,  and  even — most  appalling  of  all  in  the  author's  eyes — 
practised  the  '  defilement  of  the  flesh  '  and  indulged  their  un- 
natural lusts.1  How  far  the  writer  gives  a  correct  version  of 
their  doctrines  in  this  last  respect,  or  whether  he  was  not 
repeating  mere  malignant  rumours,  we  need  not  decide ;  the 
fast  of  their  hyper-Pauline  Antinomianism  and  of  the  distinct- 
ively Gnostic  type  of  their  *  defilements'  remains  unshaken. 
But  whether  we  see  in  them  Carpocratists  or  Archontics, 
or  members  of  some  school  that  afterwards  disappeared, 
we  cannot  date  either  them  or  the  Epistle  before  the  time  of 
the  Pastoral  Epistles.2 

The  writer  also  shows  by  his  conception  of  faith  that  he  is 
a  man  of  a  later  time ;  our  '  most  holy  faith  '  is  a  thing 
which  can  be  delivered  once  and  for  all,3  and  is  therefore  ob- 
jectively the  orthodox  creed.  The  time  of  Christ's  Apostles  is 
past,  according  to  verse  17,  and  in  verse  4  a  saying  of  Christ's 
is  introduced  as  having  been  set  forth  from  of  old.  The  fact 
that  he  does  quote  sentences  of  Christian  origin — even  though 
we  may  continually  dispute  his  acquaintance  with  Paul  and 
more  particularly  with  the  Pastoral  Epistles — proves  that  he 
did  not  belong  to  the  first  two  Christian  generations.  Nor 
would  his  active  use  of  Apocryphal  writings — such  as  of  the 
Assumption  of  Moses 4  and  of  the  Book  of  Enoch  5 — seem 
to  betray  the  taste  of  a  Primitive  Apostle  either,  and  the 
occurrence  of  two  or  three  such  quotations  in  this  short  Epistle 
is  surely  a  fact  of  some  importance.  From  our  knowledge  of 
the  history  of  these  Apocrypha,  as  well  as  of  Gnosticism  and 
of  the  Epistle  itself,  it  seems  most  natural  to  assume  that  the 
author  was  an  Egyptian  Christian.  From  external  evidence 
alone  we  know  that  Jude  must  have  been  written  before  180, 
but  we  should  not  venture  to  decide  on  any  positive  decade 
between  that  year  and  100.  It  would  be  advisable,  however, 
not  to  place  it  too  late,  as  the  author's  mood  seems  to  be  one 
of  astonishment  and  indignation  at  this  new  ungodliness. 

1  Vv.  8  and  23.  -  See  pp.  195  fol. 

3  Vv.  3,  20.  4  Verse  9.  5  Verse  14  (and  6  ?). 


232      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  in. 

Hence,  if  the  Epistle  of  Jude  belongs  to  the  second  century, 
it  cannot  have  been  written  by  the  brother  of  Jesus  and  of 
James  ;  and  it  joins  the  class  of  pseudonymous  epistles. 
Certainly  it  is  astonishing  that  the  author  should  have  chosen 
as  the  patron  for  his  short  address  a  man  so  little  known,  who 
must  have  been,  one  would  think,  almost  forgotten  in  the 
writer's  time.  It  is  true  that  we  do  not  recognise  the  axiom 
that  a  pseudo-John  could  not  possibly  have  been  named  John, 
but  we  prefer  to  renounce  the  doubtful  hypothesis  that  the 
writer  of  Jude's  epistle  himself  bore  the  name  of  Jude,  and 
that  this  decided  him  in  his  choice  among  names  of  weight 
for  his  pamphlet.  But  neither  the  '  brother  of  James  ' l  nor, 
as  some  have  suggested,  the  whole  superscription  has  the 
air  of  a  later  addition  ;  and  the  question  why  a  later  inter- 
polator should  have  made  such  an  addition  would  be  still 
more  unanswerable.  The  most  probable  supposition  is  that 
the  author  belonged  by  birth  to  those  circles  in  which  the 
memory  of  James  was  specially  revered,  that  he  did  not 
venture  to  ascribe  his  well-meant  work  to  James  himself,  but 
was  satisfied  with  a  name  from  among  his  family,  his  house 
community.  Perhaps  Jude  had  lived  on  after  his  brother's 
death  into  a  time  when  none  of  the  Lord's  Apostles  were 
left  in  Palestine,  and  might  therefore  be  used  to  personate 
the  herald  of  the  prophesied  abomination  with  greater  fitness 
than  any  other  among  the  band  of  the  first  generation. 

For  the  relation  of  Jude  to  2.  Peter  see  §  18,  par.  4. 


§  18.  The  Second  Epistle  of  Peter 

[Of.  F.  Spitta's  'Der  zweite  Petrusbrief  und  der  Brief  des 
Judas '  (1885),  a  clever  but  unsuccessful  attempt  to  place  2.  Peter 
before  1.  Peter  and  Jude.  See  also  the  works  mentioned  in 
§15.] 

1.  The  address  and  greeting  are  followed  by  an  introduc- 
tion,2 in  which  the  writer  exhorts  his  readers  to  become 
perfect  in  knowledge  and  virtue,  in  token  of  their  gratitude  for 
God's  glorious  gifts,  and  in  order  to  win  admittance  into  the 

*  Verse  1.  8  i.  3-11. 


§  18.]  Till:    SIX'OND    EPISTLE    OF    PETER  233 

Eternal  Kingdom  of  Christ.  Next  *  he  justifies  himself  for 
taking  up  his  pen,  on  the  ground  that  he  wishes  to  bear  solemn 
witness  once  more  before  he  dies  to  the  might  and  presence 
of  Jesus,  as  he  himself  had  been  allowed  to  behold  them  on 
the  *  holy  mount,'  in  exact  accordance  with  the  Old  Testa- 
ment prophecies.  At  the  same  time  he  informs  his  readers 
that  '  false  teachers '  would  appear  among  them,  striving 
with  the  subtlest  art  to  drag  them  down  in  their  own  fall, 
men  who  blasphemed  the  holiest  things  and  were  sunk 
in  the  most  detestable  transgressions.2  If  these  denied  even 
the  return  of  Christ — declaring  that  everything  since  the 
creation  had  continued  on  its  unchanging  course — he  must 
refer  his  readers  once  more  to  the  Prophets  and  Apostles,  he 
must  remind  them  of  the  Flood  and  exhort  them  to  wait 
patiently,  for  the  God  before  whom  a  thousand  years  were  as 
one  day  could  not  yet  be  accused  of  delay.3  His  long-suffering, 
which  granted  time  for  repentance  to  all,  was  the  sole  reason 
why  the  day  of  destruction  had  not  yet  appeared,  and  that  day, 
moreover,  would  come  as  a  thief  in  its  own  time,  without  any 
warning  given.  The  writer  ends 4  with  the  exhortation  to  be 
prepared  for  this  day  at  all  times,  laying  stress  in  verse  15 
on  his  agreement  with  Paul,  in  whose  epistles  there  were 
only  *  some  things  hard  to  be  understood,'  which  the  igno- 
rant '  wrested  unto  their  own  destruction.' 

2.  We  might  be  tempted  to  regard  as  the  principal  object 
of  the  Epistle  the  attack  upon  the  false  teachers,  with  which 
it  is  concerned  throughout  the  whole  of  chap.  ii.  and  also 
in  some  other  places.5  But  the  heretics  only  rouse  in  the 
author  a  sort  of  negative  interest ;  he  rids  himself  of  them 
only  in  so  far  as  they  obstruct  the  progress  of  his  readers 
towards  true  '  knowledge.'  Some  have  pointed  to  verse  iii.  15 
fol.,  and  consider  that  the  Epistle  is  intended  to  make  Peter 
appear  as  the  ally  and  defender  of  Paul,  either  as  against 
the  presumptions  of  Gnosticism,  whose  votaries  appealed  to 
Paul's  authority  in  support  of  their  own  fictions,  or  as  a  pro- 
test against  the  old  parties  in  the  Church,  who  played  off 
Peter  against  Paul  and  vice  versa.  That,  however,  is  just  as 

1  i.  12-21.  2  ii.  1-22.  s  iii.  1-13.  iii.  14-18. 

3  iii.  3-7,  16  fol.,  and  i.  16,  19-21. 


234      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  in. 

unlikely  as  that  the  objects  of  1.  Peter  or  Hebrews  should 
only  have  been  made  manifest  in  vv.  v.  12  and  xiii.  9-16 
respectively.  On  the  contrary,  the  kernel  of  the  Epistle  (that 
is,  the  key  to  its  comprehension)  lies  in  chap,  iii.,  as  we  might 
already  suppose  from  verse  iii.  1,  with  its  reference  to  i.  13 
('  to  stir  you  up  by  putting  you  in  remembrance  ') .  To  revive 
and  establish  for  all  time  the  firm  trust  in  the  Parusia  of 
Christ,  both  in  the  face  of  insolent  criticism  and  of  peevish 
murmurs  that  it  had  already  been  awaited  too  long  in  vain,  is 
the  sole  object  of  the  Epistle  ;  for  the  author  attributes  all  the 
retrogression  in  moral  conduct  in  the  Church  to  the  weakening 
of  hope  in  the  approach  of  a  heavenly  kingdom,  and  of  fear  of 
the  Last  Judgment.  In  order  to  further  the  work  of  degenera- 
tion, these  abominable  heretics  had,  with  cunning  strategy, 
made  the  belief  in  the  Parusia  their  chief  point  of  attack ; 
he  who  sought  to  save  this  belief  must  begin  by  refuting 
the  heretics  and  exposing  them  in  all  their  worthlessness 
beneath  the  full  glare  of  the  Divine  judgments  and  sentences, 
as  made  known  in  the  Bible.  Their  opinion  must  be  divested  in 
advance  of  all  authority  in  the  discussions  about  the  Parusia. 
The  connection  between  chap.  i.  and  vv.  iii.  1-13  is  still  more 
distinct;  as  early  as  i.  3-11  our  gaze  is  directed  towards  the 
great  and  precious  promises,  towards  the  eternal  kingdom 
of  Christ,  which  men  might  deserve  by  a  firm  faith  and 
the  diligent  practice  of  virtue  ;  while  vv.  i.  12-21  point  to 
the  guarantees  for  the  Christian's  belief  in  the  Parusia— 
the  inspired  Prophets  and  Apostles  who  were  eye-witnesses 
and  ear-witnesses  of  the  glory  of  Jesus.  For  what  was  the 
Transfiguration  on  the  Holy  Mount  but  a  foretaste  of  the 
Parusia  ?  The  *  knowledge  '  on  which  the  writer  lays  such 
stress  '  refers  to  the  motives  of  God  in  delaying — apparently 
—the  fulfilment  of  his  promises  concerning  the  Second 
Coming,  and  in  iii.  14-18  he  returns  in  reality  to  the  sub- 
ject of  the  opening  exhortations,  the  meaning  of  which  is  here 
for  the  first  time  made  fully  clear.  In  verse  15  he  emphasises 
the  fact  once  more  that  the  teaching  of  all  the  Apostles — not 
excepting  Paul,  out  of  whose  Epistles  the  enemy  sought  to 
make  capital — was  absolutely  identical  on  this  point. 

1  i.  2,  3,  5,  6,  8,  ii.  20  and  iii.  18. 


§  18.]  THE    SECOND    EPISTLE    OP    PETER  235 

We  must  confess  that  the  author  has  put  his  case  not 
unskilfully,  except  for  the  somewhat  extravagant  polemical 
part  in  chap.  ii. ;  he  shows  what  powerful  authority  the 
expectation  of  the  Parusia  had  on  its  side,  how  base  and 
vulgar  were  its  opponents,  and  this  prepares  the  reader's  mind 
for  the  explanation  why  there  was  and  could  be  no  question 
of  a  disappointment  of  hopes  already  excited,  in  spite  of  the 
delay  in  their  fulfilment.  The  intellectual  demands  of  his 
readers  would  certainly  have  been  completely  satisfied  by  such 
a  treatment  of  the  subject.  It  is  more  doubtful  whether  the 
Epistle  immediately  produced  that  moral  and  religious 
growth  which,  in  the  writer's  eyes,  was  the  necessary  conse- 
quence of  this  strengthening  of  Christian  knowledge  ;  too  little 
is  left  in  2.  Peter  of  the  infectious  enthusiasm  kindled  by  the 
love  of  Christ  which  glows  throughout  the  First  Epistle. 

3.  The  Epistle  purports  to  be  written  by  '  Symeon  Peter, 
a  servant  and  apostle  of  Jesus  Christ '  (the  combination  is 
similar  to  that  in  Romans  i.  1-4)  and  is  addressed  to  all 
believers.  We  cannot  for  a  moment  entertain  the  idea  of 
rejecting  the  superscription,  since  both  in  vv.  i.  18  and 
iii.  15  the  writer  appears  again  as  an  Apostle,  in  the  former 
as  one  of  the  disciples  who  witnessed  the  scene  of  the 
Transfiguration  } — i.e.  either  as  Peter  or  as  one  of  the  sons  of 
Zebedee — while  in  iii.  1  he  represents  himself  as  one  who  had 
already  written  an  Epistle  to  the  same  addressees,  and  in  i.  13 
as  one  who  in  the  face  of  approaching  death  wished  to  draw 
up  his  testament  for  the  Christian  world.  Nor  is  he  any- 
where untrue  to  the  part,  either  as  regards  himself  or  his 
readers ;  in  i.  16,  it  is  true,  the  readers  appear  to  owe 
their  Christianity,  not  to  himself,  but  to  all  the  Apostles, 
but  that  might  be  said  of  all  Christians ;  and  the  words 
of  iii.  2,  *  the  commandment  of  the  Lord  and  Saviour 
through  your  Apostles,'  is  only  intended,  like  the  passage 
about  Paul,  to  emphasise  the  uniformity  of  all  Apostolic 
declarations.  The  words  of  an  Apostle  were,  according  to  the 
writer's  conception  of  him,  intended  for  every  believer,  and 
therefore  he  did  not  recognise  any  difference  2  between  his 
own  or  1.  Peter's  circle  of  readers,  and  that  of  a  Pauline 

1  Matt.  xvii.  1  fol.  2  iii.  1. 


236     AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  in. 

Epistle.1  Whether  the  writer  had  any  particular  passage  of 
the  Pauline  literature  in  his  mind  when  he  wrote  verse  iii.  15 
is  uncertain,2  but  to  doubt  the  identity  of  the  earlier  letter 
mentioned  in  iii.  1  with  1.  Peter,  and  to  invent  a  lost  Epistle 
of  Peter  in  its  stead,  is  a  piece  of  hypercriticism  on  the  part 
of  the  partisans  of  tradition  all  the  more  superfluous  as 
the  reference  here  to  1.  Peter  is  not  in  the  least  unnatural. 
The  longing  for  the  Parusia  dominates  1.  Peter  too,  and  it  is 
precisely  the  thesis  of  the  First  Epistle  that  '  the  end  of  all 
things  is  at  hand ' :*  that  2.  Peter  is  intended  to  defend, 
although  certainly  with  some  explanatory  reservations, 
against  those  who  denied  the  doctrine  of  the  Second  Coming. 
2.  Peter,  in  short,  appears  to  stand  in  the  same  relationship 
to  1.  Peter  as  2.  Thessalonians  to  1.  Thessalonians. 

4.  This  apparently  obvious  situation,  however,  out  of 
which  2.  Peter  seems  to  have  arisen,  is  untenable  when  sub- 
jected to  criticism.  2.  Peter  was  not  written  by  the  author 
of  the  First  Epistle,  so  that  if  the  latter,  which  is  cited  by 
our  Epistle  as  Petrine,  is  not  from  the  hand  of  Peter,  how 
much  less  can  the  Second  Epistle  claim  to  be  of  Apostolic 
origin  !  In  no  New  Testament  writing  can  pseudonymity  be 
so  abundantly  proved  as  in  2.  Peter,  and  in  none  has  it  been 
recognised  by  so  many  scholars  who  in  other  matters  hold 
the  most  conservative  views.  It  is  precisely  in  order  to  save 
the  First  Epistle  that  these  latter  have  given  up  the  Second. 
That  the  two  Epistles  have  some  points  in  common  goes  with- 
out saying,  when  we  consider  the  acquaintance  of  the  one  with 
the  other,  but  nevertheless  they  are  as  far  removed  from  one 
another  both  in  form  and  substance  as,  say,  Hebrews  from 
G-alatians.  And  since,  if  we  accepted  their  authenticity,  they 
must  necessarily  approach  each  other  very  nearly,  this 
difficulty  is  insurmountable ;  it  increases  still  more,  however, 
when  Zahn  places  the  Second  Epistle  a  few  years  earlier 
than  the  First,  the  only  result  of  which  is  to  show,  to  our 
considerable  surprise,  how  far  greater  was  the  presump- 
tive writer  of  1.  Peter,  Silvanus,  than  the  '  pillar-apostle ' 

1  iii.  15. 

2  It  might  suggest  Horn.  ii.  4,  but  also  2.  Thess.  ii.  13  fol.  and  1.  Thess. 
v.  1  fol.  >  1.  Peter,  iv.  7. 


§  18.]  THE    SECOND    EPISTLE    OF    I'KTER  237 

trained  in  the  school  of  Jesus.  The  style  of  2.  Peter,  which 
is  quite  different  in  vocabulary  from  the  First  Epistle,  is 
marked  by  a  certain  turgidity  which  offers  the  strongest 
contrast  to  the  fluency  of  1.  Peter  ;  the  writer  tries  to  write 
elegantly,1  but  is  in  reality  very  far  from  faultless  in  the 
construction  of  his  sentences.'2  We  are  also  struck  by  the 
scantiness  of  his  modes  of  expression,  which  obliges  him  to 
make  frequent  repetitions  of  the  same  phrases.  The  part 
which  in  1.  Peter  is  played  by  hope,  is  here  taken  by  know- 
ledge ;  the  sufferings  and  persecutions  around  which  every- 
thing turns  in  1.  Peter  are  here  not  even  mentioned  ;  what 
1.  Peter  reveres  most  highly  in  Christ  is  his  blessed  suffering  ; 
here  it  is  his  majesty  and  power. 

But  2.  Peter  is  very  largely  dependent  upon  Jude,  and  the 
very  fact  that  by  far  the  greater  part  of  the  latter  Epistle  (late 
as  it  is)  is  taken  up  and  repeated  in  2.  Peter,  destroys  the 
assumption  of  the  latter's  authenticity  even  if  it  were  possible 
to  credit  Peter  with  so  gross  a  piece  of  plagiarism.  Chap. 
ii.  is  a  complete  reproduction  of  Jude  3-18.  The  fact  that 
Jude  in  verse  18  mentions  as  an  Apostolic  prophecy  words 
which  might  be  identified  with  2.  Peter  iii.  3,  might  seem  to 
favour  the  priority  of  the  latter  ;  but  in  reality  this  is  only 
brought  forward  in  Jude  as  a  prophecy  universally  known. 
In  all  the  rest  of  the  passage  we  should  be  more  likely,  in 
comparing,  so  far  as  is  possible,  the  parallels  between  Jude 
and  2.  Peter,  to  recognise  a  motive  for  the  latter  to  alter, 
amplify,  smooth  down  and  give  a  rhetorical  polish  to  the 
material  he  had  before  him  in  Jude,  than  vice  versa.  Again, 
the  fact  seems  to  me  to  weigh  heavily  against  the  priority 
of  2.  Peter,  that  while  Jude  openly  speaks  of  the  heretics 
as  of  an  existing  danger,  the  author  of  2.  Peter  tries  to 
maintain  the  fiction  that  he  is  merely  prophesying  future 
events,  but  betrays  the  unreality  of  his  attitude  by  con- 
stantly slipping  back  from  the  future  of  vv.  ii.  1  fol.  into  the 
present  3  and  even  into  the  past  4  tenses.  Could  Jude,  in 


1  Cf.  expressions  like  M0??,  i.  0  ;  Taprapoa),  ii.  4  ;  £AeV/ta,  ii.  8,  and 
ii.  7  and  iii.  17. 

2  i.  3  fol.  and  ii.  15  fol. 

3  Vv.  ii.  10,  12  fol.,  18,  and  so  on.  *  ii.  15,  22. 


238      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  in. 

the  position  of  imitator,  have  transformed  this  impression 
of  artificiality  into  one  of  naturalness  by  an  equally  arti- 
ficial alteration  of  certain  passages  ?  And  what  object  can 
there  have  been  in  constructing  the  Epistle  of  Jude  out  of 
2.  Peter  ? 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  quite  conceivable  that  the  author 
of  2.  Peter  might  have  woven  into  his  own  Epistle,  though  with 
the  omission  of  the  quotations  from  Apocryphal  writings 
to  which  exception  might  be  taken,1  the  smaller  and,  as  he 
thought,  already  half-forgotten  Epistle  of  Jude,  whose  vigorous 
invectives  seemed  to  him  quite  worth  using.  Jude  is  intel- 
ligible from  beginning  to  end  without  the  supposition  that  it 
drew  from  a  previous  work,  and  so  is  2.  Peter,  for  indeed 
it  must  honestly  be  confessed  that  if  we  had  had  no  knowledge 
of  Jude,  we  should  never  have  suspected  that  an  older  document 
had  here  been  copied  down  with  a  mixture  of  freedom  and 
servility  most  instructive  to  the  student  of  literary  obligations  ; 
still,  since  we  must  choose,  everything  seems  to  speak  for 
the  priority  of  Jude  (as  above  for  that  of  1.  Peter).  The 
parallels  to  Jude  are  to  be  met  with  throughout  the  whole 
Epistle,2  so  that  by  such  hypotheses  as  that  a  later  writer  had 
interpolated  the  whole  central  portion,3  a  recast  of  the 
Epistle  of  Jude,  into  a  genuine  Epistle  of  Peter,  we  only 
create  difficulties  where  all  might  be  clear.  As  is  shown  in 
vv.  20-23,  Jude  combats  heresy  as  such ;  hence  he  concludes 
with  counsels  as  to  how  his  readers  were  to  defend  them- 
selves against  their  seducers,  and  help  back  the  seduced 
into  the  right  path.  In  tone  and  expression  these  counsels 
suit  the  preceding  arguments  excellently ;  2.  Peter,  on  the 
other  hand,  employs  the  diatribe  against  heretics  as  the 
means  to  another  end,  and  can  therefore  do  nothing  with 
Jude  20-23.  Does  this  not  destroy  the  assumption  that  Jude 
is  an  excerpt  from  2.  Peter  ? 

Moreover,  the  author  of  2.  Peter  made  free  use  of  other 
writings  also :  of  the  Pauline  Epistles,4  including  the 

1  Vv.  0  and  14  fol. 

•  i.  5   (<nrou5V  iracrav  =  Jude  3),  12  (virofjLint/rjffKfif  .   .   ,   (i86ras  -  Jude    5), 
and  again  in  iii.  3,  7,  17  and  18. 

»  i.  20-iii.  3.  4  E.g.,  1.  Thess.  v.  2  in  iii.  10. 


§  18.]  THE   SECOND    EPISTLE    OF    PETER  239 

Pastorals,1  of  the  Gospels,  probably  of  the  First  Epistle  of 
Clement,  and  of  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter,  recently  discovered 
in  an  Egyptian  tomb.-  The  points  of  contact  between  these 
two  pseudonymous  Petrine  writings  are  certainly  not  acci- 
dental ;  they  might  possibly  be  explained  on  the  supposition 
that  both  had  made  use  of  a  third  document,  but  more  easily 
by  the  contrary  assumption  that  the  author  of  the  Apocalypse 
was  acquainted  with  2.  Peter.  But  so  long  as  the  date  of 
this  Apocalypse  remains  undetermined,  the  solution  of  the 
question  is  for  the  present  of  little  use  to  us. 

5.  One  thing  gains  a  certain  amount  of  probability  from  the 
above-mentioned  resemblance,  as  well  as  from  the  incorpora- 
tion of  Jude,  and  that  is  that  2.  Peter,  like  the  two  writings  in 
question,   was   of    Palestinian   or    Egyptian   origin.      With 
regard  to  its  date,  the  external  evidence  supplies  a  terminus 
ad  quern  at  the  end  of  the  second  century  at  latest,  and  we 
shall  not  challenge  the  assignment  to  the  period  between  125 
and  175.    We  do  not  wish  to  lay  too  much  stress  on  the  doubts 3 
raised   by  the   non-appearance  of   the   Parusia,  since  these 
might  easily  have  arisen  earlier,  but  there  is  no  lack  of  other 
evidence,  even  apart  from  the  literary  dependence  of  the  Epistle. 
The  primitive  Catholic  Church   with  its    three  authorities, 
the  Prophets,  the  Lord,  and  the  Apostles,  is  complete 4 ;   the 
Epistles  of  '  our  brother  Paul '  had  not  only  been  completely 
collected,  but  could  be  placed   on  a  level  with   '  the  other 
scriptures,' 5    and   therefore   enjoyed    Canonical   acceptance, 
while  both  Gnostics  and  orthodox  Christians  appealed  to  them 
as   authorities   in   their    disputes.     In   spite   of   the   hatred 
against  Gnosticism,  the  Church  had  adopted  the  Gnostic's 
worst  fault,  his  exaggerated  reverence  for  knowledge.     How- 
ever plainly  the  Epistle  may  assume  the  part  of  a  precautionary 
exhortation   designed   for   the   needs   of    later   times,6   it   is 
nevertheless  clear  that  it  was  written  in  the  very  midst  of  the 
struggle   against   heresy,   against    subjectivism    (see   i.    20 : 
i&las  ETri\v(T£ws) ;  and  that  it  only  recognised  as  true  what 

1  E.g.,  i.  16,  arfO-oQiff/JLevoi.  /J.v6ot. 

2  Cf.  A.  Harnack,  Texte  und  Untersuchuiigcn,  ix.  2,  pp.  90  fol.    (1893), 
2nd  ed.  pp.  87  fol. 

3  iii.  4.  4  i.  19-21,  iii.  2.  5  iii.  16. 
6  Most  markedly  in  iii.  17. 


240      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  in. 

was  attested  by  Prophets  and  Apostles,  or  what  could  vindicate 
itself  by  its  moral  effects.1  And— to  mention  one  last  detail 
— the  idea  expressed  in  i.  4,  that  we  should  '  become  partakers 
of  the  divine  nature  and  escape  from  corruption,'  bears  such 
obvious  marks  of  a  theological  system  influenced  by  Hellen- 
istic ideas,  that  we  can  only  ascribe  the  Epistle — an  artificial 
product  after  the  manner  and  in  the  taste  of  that  time — to 
an  ecclesiastical  theologian  of  very  late  date. 

Finally,  the  assiduity  with  which  the  Pseudo-Peter  here 
carries  out  the  fiction  is  an  evidence  of  the  fact  that  2.  Peter 
was  composed  in  a  later  period  of  pseudonymous  ecclesiastical 
literature  than  were  the  Epistles  of  Jude,  James,  and  1.  Peter. 
We  leave  the  Pastoral  Epistles  out  of  account,  because 
their  author  was  moved  to  imitate  Paul's  Epistles,  even  in 
minute  details,  by  the  many  genuine  Epistles  from  which  he 
had  drawn  a  great  part  of  his  spiritual  nourishment.  But 
the  fiction  of  their  authorship  is  not  an  integral  part  of  Jude, 
James  and  1.  Peter ;  it  is  only  added  loosely,  as  a  frame  to  a 
picture  already  finished  and  complete  in  itself.  With  2.  Peter, 
on  the  other  hand,  it  is  the  first  consideration  in  the  writer's 
literary  scheme,  and  the  author  never  loses  the  consciousness 
of  the  part  he  is  playing.  The  reference  in  i.  13  fol.  to  the 
prophecy  by  Jesus  of  Peter's  death  in  John  xxi.  18  fol. 
is  unmistakable ;  and  the  eye-witness  of  the  Transfiguration 
distinguishes  himself  with  equal  conspicuousness  in  i.  18  from 
the  readers  who  '  love  Jesus,  not  having  seen  him.' 2  Verse  i. 
15  certainly  refers  on  the  surface  to  the  Epistle  he  was  engaged 
in  writing,  but  the  fact — of  which  the  fame  was  spread  by 
Papias — that  Peter  had  laid  the  foundation  for  a  trustworthy 
Gospel  may  be  read  between  the  lines.  In  vv.  ii.  1  and  iii.  17 
the  fiction  is  carefully  maintained  that  Peter  could  only  speak 
prophetically  of  the  false  teachers  of  the  second  century ;  in 
iii.  15  the  writer  brackets  himself  with  Paul,  to  whom  wisdom 
had  been  given  from  above  because  the  two  Apostles,  Peter 
and  Paul,  had  long  been  coupled  in  men's  mouths  ;  and  in  iii. 
1  he  refers  to  the  Epistle  already  in  circulation  under  the 
name  of  Peter.  This  writer,  in  short,  constructs  his  fiction 
methodically :  he  is  anxious  from  the  first  about  the  success 

1  i.  5-7,  8.  -  1.  Peter  i.  8. 


$  19.]  THE    FIRST   EPISTLE    OF    JOHN  241 

of  his  enterprise;  but  this  only  shows  that  the  public  had 
already  learnt  not  to  accept  indiscriminately  all  that  was 
offered  to  it  under  an  Apostolic  title,  and  that  mere  correctness 
of  contents  was  no  longer  considered  sufficient.  It  proves 
nothing,  however,  for  the  genuineness  of  documents  in  which 
the  fiction  of  authorship  had  no  further  influence — naturally 
always  an  unfavourable  one — on  their  contents.  James, 
Jude  and  1.  Peter  are  still  flowers  of  free  growth,  whose  scent 
loses  none  of  its  sweetness  for  the  names  they  go  by  ;  2.  Peter 
is  an  artificial  production  of  learned  ingenuity.  Probably 
the  least  questionable  statement  of  any  here  laid  down  is 
that  2.  Peter  is  not  only  the  latest  document  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment, but  also  the  least  deserving  of  a  place  in  the  Canon. 

§  19.  The  First  Epistle  of  John 

[Cf.  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  vol.  xiv.:  the  Johannine  Epistles  by 
B.  Weiss  (1900,  ed.  6) ;  Hand- Commen tar  iv.,  the  Gospel,  Epistles 
and  Revelation  of  John,  by  H.  Holtzmann  (1893).  The  most 
valuable  of  the  monographs,  in  spite  of  its  edifying  tendency,  is  that 
ofE.  Rothe  (1878);  W.  Karl's  '  Johanneische  Studien,'  i.,  1898 
(1.  John),  is  original,  but,  in  my  opinion,  wrong  on  every  point; 
otherwise  cf.  T.  Haring's  '  Gedankengang  und  Grundgedanke  des 
lsten  Johannesbriefs,'  to  be  found  in  the  Congratulatory  Address  to 
Carl  von  Weizsiicker,  pp.  173-200  (1892).  Wiesinger  in  the  '  Theo- 
logische  Studien  und  Kritiken  '  for  1899,  pp.  575-581,  gives  a 
simple  analysis  of  the  train  of  ideas  in  1.  John.] 

1.  The  innumerable  attempts  to  discover  a  well-considered 
arrangement  in  the  First  Epistle  of  John  have  had  the  merit 
of  neutralising  one  another.  Even  T.  Haring's  interpretation, 
though  sympathetic  in  itself,  supposes  the  writer  to  have 
been  filled  with  an  almost  exaggerated  feeling  for  the  very 
thing  towards  which  he  openly  displays  his  absolute  indiffer- 
ence— viz.  a  strictly  logical  and  harmoniously  ascending 
development  of  ideas.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  aphoristically 
and  in  the  form  of  meditations  that  his  groups  of  ideas,  both 
large  and  small,  are  put  together :  not  indeed  in  the  manner 
of  a  later  rearrangement  of  long-completed  fragments,  but  as 
a  continuous  stream  of  '  pensees '  upon  various  successive 
subjects.  Thus  the  transitions  from  one  section  to  another, 

R 


242       AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  in. 

as  well  as  the  unexpected  returns  to  themes  already  fully 
discussed,  only  arise  from  the  varying  nioods  of  the  writer, 
and  this  partly  explains  the  fact  that  at  many  points  it  is 
impossible  to  make  out  where  the  boundary  between  two 
reflections  lies.  And  just  as  large  sections  of  the  Epistle 
might  be  taken  away  without  leaving  any  visible  gap,  so 
before  the  end  the  writer  might  have  continued  the  old 
threads  for  some  time  longer  without  altering  the  character  of 
the  Epistle,  or  in  any  way  diminishing  or  increasing  the 
impression  created  by  the  whole. 

Verses  i.  1-4  form  the  introduction,  in  which  the  writer 
asserts  his  fitness  for  the  task  before  him.  Next ]  he  makes  it 
clear  that  fellowship  with  God,  who  is  synonymous  with  light, 
was  out  of  the  question  in  the  case  of  certain  men — those 
who  walked  in  darkness,  who  thought  themselves,  forsooth, 
free  from  sin,  and  yet  did  not  fulfil  the  commandments  of 
Christ — who,  above  all,  blindly  and  shamefully  neglected 
his  principal  commandment,  that  of  brotherly  love.  His 
readers,  on  the  other  hand,  to  whom  he  first  offers  the 
highest  testimony,2  were  not  to  allow  themselves  to  be  led 
away  by  any  temptation  from  the  love  of  the  Father  to  the 
love  of  the  world.3  The  danger  was  not  small,  for  the  fore- 
runners of  the  approaching  End  had  now  arisen  in  great 
numbers  :  the  Antichrists  who  owned  not  Jesus  as  the  Christ, 
and  therefore  denied  both  Father  and  Son.4  The  faithful 
should  attack  such  seducers  with  the  strong  self-confidence  of 
those  who  had  long  possessed  the  unction  of  the  Spirit,"'  who 
were  already  children  of  God,  and  were  only  bound  to  prove 
it  by  doing  justly  and  practising  a  brotherly  love  that 
rejoiced  in  all  self-sacrifice.  Nought  but  this  distinguished 
the  children  of  God  from  the  Cainites,  the  children  of  the 
Devil.6  In  iii.  2,  3  the  writer  sums  up  and  defines  the  com- 
mandment of  God,  *  that  we  should  believe  in  the  name  of 
his  Son  Jesus  Christ,  and  love  one  another,'  and  appears  to 
be  hastening  to  a  close 7 ;  but  in  iii.  24  he  introduces,  with  the 
remark  '  thereby  we  know  that  he  abideth  in  us,  by  the  Spirit 
which  he  gave  us,'  a  keen  argument "  against  the  false  spirits 

•1.5-15.11.  -  ii.  12-14.  i.  15-17.  '  ii.  18-26. 

W\  fol.  "  ii.  28   iii.  18.  7  iii.  19  fol.  8  iv.  1-6. 


§  19.]  TIIK    KIKST    KL'ISTLE    OF   JOHN  243 

who  denied  that  Jesus  Christ  was  '  come  in  the  flesh,'  and 
points  out  the  connection  between  the  commandment 
to  love  our  brother  and  the  belief  in  Jesus,  the  Son  of 
God.1  This  faith  was  our  acknowledgment  of  the  boundless 
love  of  God  for  us  ;  it  lifted  us  into  the  sphere  of  God  (that 
is,  of  Love),  and  our  continuance  therein  was  impossible 
unless  we  became  one  with  it  and  practised  Love.  The  last 
verses  *  give  a  final  exhortation  to  joy  in  prayer,  to  a  common 
battle  against  sin,  and  against  the  world  which  '  lieth  in  the 
evil  one.'  We  possess  the  true  God  and  eternal  life  in  Jesus 
Christ ;  far  be  it,  then,  from  us  to  worship  idols  ! 

2.  It  is  evident  that  our  Epistle,  which,  in  spite  of  the 
words  *  I  write  unto  you,'  '  I  have  written  unto  you,'  and,  as 
early  as  i.  4,  '  these  things  we  write,'  hardly  bears  the  ap- 
pearance of  a  letter,  is  a  manifesto  addressed  to  the  whole  of 
Christendom.  The  words  '  you  also,'  '  ye  also,'  of  i.  3,  are  not 
intended  to  distinguish  certain  definite  readers  from  the  great 
mass  of  believers,  but  rather  to  differentiate  the  Church 
founded  by  the  Apostles  from  its  founders,  the  eye-witnesses 
of  revelation.  The  words  in  which  the  readers  are  addressed, 
*  little  children,'  '  my  little  children,'  '  brethren,'  '  beloved  ' 
(and  at  one  point 3  the  '  little  children '  are  divided  into 
'  fathers '  and  'young  men  '),  are  as  indefinite  as  possible  in 
tone :  no  trace  is  to  be  found  of  a  narrower  circle  of  readers, 
and  in  v.  11-13  'you  '  is  exchanged  for  'we.'  Zahn's  pene- 
tration discovers  in  this  Epistle,  free  as  it  is  from  all  personal 
references,  that  the  addressees 4  represent  only  a  part  of 
Christendom,  the  Asiatic  churches,  which,  according  to  v.  21, 
had  grown  up  on  heathen  soil :  thus,  he  interprets  the  words 
'  ye  have  overcome  them '  of  iv.  4  in  the  sense  of  '  the  Asiatic 
churches  have  overcome  them.'  Unfortunately,  however,  it 
is  not  so  easy  to  construe  verse  iv.  4''  as  '  the  God  that  is  in  the 
Asiatic  churches  is  greater  than  he  that  is  in  the  world.'  It 
seems  most  natural  to  look  for  the  object  of  this  encyclical  in 
the  preservation  of  Christianity  (to  which  of  course  the  false 
spirits  and  the  Antichrists  no  longer  belonged 5)  in  the  true 
faith  of  Christ  and  the  true  brotherly  love,  without  which 
there  could  be  no  union  with  God.  But  the  author  was 

1   iv.  7-v.  13.  »J        in.          3  ii.  12-14.  4  ii.  19.  >  ii.  19. 

K  2 


244      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  111. 

surely  urged  to  this  enthusiasm  for  preservation  only  by 
painful  experiences.  Many  Antichrists  had  arisen  under 
the  mask  of  Christianity,1  boasting  that  they  possessed  the 
Spirit,  and  disputing  the  identity  of  the  human  Jesus  with 
Christ,  the  Son  of  God.2 

Now  this  was  a  form  of  Docetism  which  is  only  attested 
and  conceivable  as  having  grown  up  within  the  Gnostic  circle  ; 
the  persons  concerned  had  evidently  boasted  of  their  new 
and  perfect  knowledge 3  of  the  true  God,4  a  knowledge  which 
absolutely  rejected  the  idea  of  an  incarnation  of  the  Divine  ; 
they  had  represented  themselves  as  the  true  possessors  of  the 
Spirit  (Pneumatists),5  had  promised  eternal  life  to  their 
partisans  alone,6  and  had  openly  shown  an  indifference  to  the 
fate  of  their  non-Pneumatist  brethren  described  by  our  author 
as  the  hatred  we,  the  children  of  light,  were  bound  to  expect 
from  the  world.  They  had  disputed  the  possibility  of  sin  for 
themselves  (i.e.  the  full  Christians,  the  Pneumatists) — for  to 
distinguish  the  liars  and  seducers  of  ii.  4,  iv.  20,  i.  8  and  iii.  7, 
from  those  of  ii.  22  and  26  is  quite  unwarranted — and  conse- 
quently had  erased  from  the  history  of  salvation  as  super- 
fluous the  atoning  death  of  the  Son  of  God,  and  had  declared 
themselves,  at  least  in  theory,  superior  to  all  moral  law  and 
bound  by  no  commandments.  Both  this  Antinomianism  and 
the  above-mentioned  denial  of  Jesus,  had  sprung,  according 
to  our  Epistle,  from  one  root ;  and  we  find  in  effect  that  such 
theory  and  practice  was  combined  in  Gnosticism.  We  may 
therefore  conclude  that  1.  John  was  a  polemical  writing 
directed  against  an  Antinomian  form  of  Gnosticism,  but 
defending  the  true  Gnosis,  which,  in  the  first  place,  saw  in 
the  incarnate  Son  of  God  the  true  knowledge  of  God,  with  all 
that  that  involved — i.e.  forgiveness  of  sins,  justification, 
sanctification,  eternal  life — and,  in  the  second,  recognised  the 
necessity  of  breaking  with  sin  and  practising  love.  As 
against  the  pride  of  the  Pneumatists,7  again,  it  could  not 
emphasise  the  fact  too  strongly  that  whatever  qualities  of 
religion  and  morality  we  possessed  were  the  gifts  of  God 


1  ii.  18  fol. 
3  ii.  3  fol. 
•  ii.  25-28. 


*  ii.  22,  iv.  2  fol.,  v.  1,  5,  6  fol.  and  20. 
4  E.g..  v.  20  fol.  5  iv.  1-3,  6. 

7  iii.  1,  24,  iv.  13,  v.  11,  20. 


§  19.]  THE    FIKST   EPISTLE   OP   JOHN  245 

alone,  and  that  our  presumed  possession  of  them  could  only 
be  shown  to  be  actual  (that  is,  really  coming  from  God)  by 
corresponding  actions.  Every  sentence  of  our  Epistle  is 
written  in  the  interests  of  such  a  defence,  and  it  was  because 
the  author  continually  imagined  that  he  had  not  brought 
forward  arguments  enough  that  he  so  often  returned  to  what 
had  gone  before,  and  was  sometimes  not  even  afraid  of  contra- 
dicting himself.1  He  draws  upon  his  whole  world  of  ideas  to 
furnish  weapons  in  the  battle  against  moral  and  religious 
confusion,  but  urges  nothing  in  support  of  those  ideas  them- 
selves except  where  argument  might  be  useful  in  strengthen- 
ing the  confidence  of  his  readers  in  Anti-Gnostic  Christianity. 

3.  It  is  impossible  to  name  an  exact  date  for  the  com- 
position of  the  Epistle.  The  Gnostic  pseudo-prophets  seem 
at  any  rate  to  have  appeared  in  large  numbers 2  and  with  full 
confidence  of  success,  which  is  surely  not  probable  before  the 
second  century.  We  do  not  recognise  any  definite  Gnostic 
School  in  the  few  distinct  indications  given  by  the  Epistle  ; 
Zahn  only  singled  out  the  Cerinthians  because  he  concluded 
from  verse  v.  6,  that  the  false  teachers  had  laid  excessive 
stress  on  the  baptism  of  Jesus,  and  had  perhaps  honoured  the 
baptist  John  almost  as  highly  as  the  man  Jesus.  But  we 
cannot  dissociate  ordinary  libertinism,  as  well  as  these  pecu- 
liar Christological  doctrines,  from  the  outbreak  of  heresy 
combated  in  1.  John,  and  we  have  no  evidence  of  such  things 
in  the  teaching  of  Cerinthus. 

It  is  indisputable,  as  far  as  concerns  the  writer  himself, 
that  the  Pauline  theology,  with  all  its  problems,  had  been  left 
far  behind,  for  the  question  of  the  validity  of  the  Mosaic  Law 
exists  as  little  in  the  author's  mind  as  that  of  the  recognition 
of  national  distinctions  between  the  children  of  God.  He 
himself  is  not  free  from  Gnostic  tendencies ;  his  Dualism, 
which  makes  so  sharp  a  contrast  between  God  and  the  world, 
the  children  of  God  and  the  children  of  the  Devil,  that  it 
leads  him  to  declare  that  'whosoever  is  begotten  of  God 
doeth  no  sin,' 3  borders  closely  on  heresy,  and  the  high 
value  he  sets  on  'knowledge '  points  in  the  same  direction.  On 
the  other  hand,  he  shares  with  the  anti-Gnostic  majority  the 

1  Cf.  i.  8  fol.  with  iii.  9  and  v.  18  fol.  2  ii.  18.  3  iii.  9. 


246      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE   NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  HI. 

practical  trait  of  insistence  upon  righteousness,  upon  the  ful- 
filment of  the  commandments  and  upon  the  practice  of  love, 
and  both  these  characteristics  together  are  the  mark  of  Old- 
Catholicism.  His  idea  of  Christ  is  not  exactly  that  of 
oneness  with  the  Father,  for  the  passages  which  sound  very 
much  like  an  obliteration  of  the  line  of  distinction  between 
Father  and  Son — and  sometimes  it  is  impossible  to  tell  which 
of  the  two  the  writer  means — are  to  be  explained  by  his 
desire  to  brand  the  denial  of  the  Son  l  as  a  denial  of  the 
Father,  and  so  to  fix  upon  the  Antichrists  the  further  sin  of 
hostility  to  God,  to  mark  them  out  as  worshippers  of  idols. 
But  the  writer  proves  himself  a  member  of  the  Catholic  Church 
by  the  stress  he  lays  upon  holding  fast  to  the  ancient  doctrine, 
the  doctrine  accessible  to  all 2 ;  the  commandment  heard  *  from 
the  beginning  '  (air'  ap-^s] 3  represents  the  same  idea  to  him, 
and  with  the  same  force,  as  does  that  of  the  tradition  delivered 
'  once  for  all '  (a7ra£),  to  Jude.4 

The  external  evidence  in  support  of  this  Epistle  is  rela- 
tively good,  but  nothing  hinders  us  from  assigning  it  to  the 
period  between  100  and  125  ;  1.  Peter  certainly  gives  us  an 
impression  of  greater  primitiveness. 

4.  The  question  of  authorship  is  here  inseparable  from 
that  of  the  relation  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Fourth  Gospel, 
and  from  that  of  its  authenticity :  that  is  to  say,  of  the 
credibility  of  that  very  ancient  Church  tradition  according  to 
which  the  Apostle  John  composed  both  the  Gospel  and  the 
Epistle.  The  main  question  can  only  be  decided,  if  at  all,  in 
dealing  with  the  Gospel ;  as  regards  the  Epistle,  we  must  first 
observe  that  the  author  does  not  name  himself,  so  that  there 
can  be  no  question  of  pseudonymity,  and  yet  that  he  assumes 
Apostolic  authority,5  although  avoiding  the  Apostolic  title. 
He  does  not  impart  a  single  saying  from  the  Saviour's  lips, 
however,  or  a  single  definite  incident  of  his  history — only 
abstract  theories  and  speculations  which  are,  to  say  the  least 
of  it,  surprising  as  coming  from  an  Apostle.  His  ignoring  of 
the  Old  Testament  is  also  remarkable,  and  in  fact  nothing 
but  the  evidence  of  the  author  himself  would  lead  us  to 

1  ii.  22  fol.  -  ii.  20,  27.  3  ii.  7,  24,  iii.  11. 

4  Jude  3  and  ",.  *  i.  1-3,  5. 


§  19.]  THE    FIRST    EPISTLE   OF   JOHN  247 

suppose  that  this  document  was  the  work  of  an  Apostle.  And 
since  this  evidence  is  limited  to  the  introductory  verses,  we 
can  only  maintain  that  what  he  wished  was  to  give  his 
production  the  authority  of  eye-  and  ear-witnesses,  rather  than 
to  take  the  name  of  one  particular  Apostle  ;  especially  when 
we  consider  the  many  plurals  in  i.  1-5.  (Later  on  the  writer 
speaks  of  himself  in  the  singular,  and  uses  the  plural,  with  or 
without  rjfjLelsy  only  when  speaking  in  the  name  of  believers 
collectively,  or  in  the  sense  of  '  one.')  But  how  indeed  could 
he  refute  the  pseudo-prophets  except  with  the  highest  of  all 
earthly  authority,  that  of  the  collective  witness  of  the  disciples 
of  Jesus,  ever  renewed  through  brotherly  love  and  destined 
to  endure  until  the  return  of  Christ  ?  If  the  writer  himself 
were  an  Apostle  of  overwhelming  authority,  he  acted  with 
very  little  wisdom  in  concealing  his  name  ;  it  would  certainly 
not  have  endangered  the  idea  of  the  uniformity  of  all  Apo- 
stolic preaching  to  have  stated  clearly  to  his  readers, — the 
like-minded,  the  hostile,  and  above  all  the  undecided — whose 
authority  it  was  that  was  here  fighting  for  the  truth. 

But  for  us  the  fact  is  all  the  more  certain  that  the  writer 
of  the  First  Epistle  of  John  is  identical  with  the  writer  of  the 
Fourth  Gospel.  The  relationship  between  the  two  documents, 
with  all  their  outward  difference  of  form,  is  most  striking. 

In  the  Gospel,  too,  the  writer  conceals  his  name,  but 
describes  himself  as  an  eye-witness  in  words  which  must  re- 
mind us  of  the  corresponding  phrases  in  the  Epistle.1  In- 
numerable parallels  between  the  two  documents  have  long  since 
been  observed,  beginning  with  the  opening  sentence  in  each.2 
Elsewhere  we  may  compare,  for  instance,  vv.  iv.  12,  20  of 
the  Epistle  with  verse  i.  18  of  the  Gospel — 'no  man  hath 
seen  God  at  any  time  ' — or  1.  John  v.  12,  *  He  that  hath  the 
Son  hath  the  life  ;  he  that  hath  not  the  Son  of  God  hath  not 
the  life,'  with  iii.  36  of  the  Gospel,  and  1.  John  i.  4,  '  that 
our  joy  may  be  fulfilled,'  with  John  xv.  11,  xvi.  24,  xvii.  13. 
There  is  never  any  question  of  mere  copying  in  these  cases, 
still  less  does  one  document  expressly  quote  the  other  ;  but 
just  as  repetitions  are  extremely  common  both  within  the 

1  Gosp.  i.  14.  xix.  35, 

2  Gosp.  eV  dpx$  ^v  >  Epist.  &  %v  O 


248       AX    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT  [CHAP.  in. 

Epistle L  and  within  the  Gospel,  though  always  with  slight  varia- 
tions of  expression,  so  these  parallels  are  to  be  explained  in 
the  same  way — and  they  alone  almost  compel  us  to  recognise 
the  identity  of  the  two  writers.  Moreover,  it  is  not  only  a 
question  of  occasional  sentences,  which  might  possibly  have 
been  incorrectly  preserved  in  the  memory  of  a  later  writer ; 
in  the  whole  vocabulary,  in  the  mode  of  thought  and  in 
the  peculiarities  of  the  style — which  are  many — there  exists 
between  the  two  documents  an  absolute  and  complete  agree- 
ment. Both  have  the  same  preference,  for  instance,  for  the 
words  p.aprvpia  and  fjuaprvpslv,  while  /jidprvs,  /Jiaprvpiov  and 
/jbapTvpsaQat,  do  not  occur  at  all ;  both  have  the  same  Hebra- 
istic manner  of  working  out  their  ideas  in  simple  sentences, 
connected  by  '  and  '  or  perhaps  not  connected  at  all — although 
it  must  be  observed  that  the  aversion  to  ydp  and  ovv  is  much 
stronger  in  the  Epistle  than  in  the  Gospel — and  in  both  we 
find  the  habit  of  giving  double  expression,  both  positive  and 
negative,  to  their  theses,2  and  an  extraordinary  abundance  of 
participles  used  as  substantives.  Such  characteristic  formulae 
as  'the  only-begotten  Son'  for  Christ,  'to  be  of  God,'  'to  be  be- 
gotten of  God,'  '  to  be  of  the  truth,' '  to  do  the  truth,' '  to  have 
the  life,'  '  to  abide  in  love,' '  to  walk  in  darkness,'  '  to  be  out  of 
the  world,'  are  only  to  be  found  in  1.  John  and  the  Gospel  of 
John.  Fundamental  ideas,  too,  like  that  of  the  necessary 
connection  between  the  love  received  from  God,  or  from 
Christ,  and  the  love  we  practise  towards  our  brethren,  of  the 
sending  of  the  Son  into  the  world  in  order  to  save  the  world 
and  to  take  away  the  sins  of  the  world,  of  the  hatred  borne 
by  the  world  against  the  brethren  3  and  of  the  victory  over 
the  world,4  all  play  the  same  part  in  both  documents. 

It  is  true  that  the  Epistle  has  some  peculiarities  :  it  alone 
Bpeaks  of  false  prophets  and  Antichrists,  of  '  denial '  in  the 
distinctively  religious  sense,  of  the  Parusia,  of  hope,  of  the 
'  doing  of  righteousness  '  (but  we  find  that  the  '  doing  of 
truth'  is  mentioned  in  both5).  Instead  of  the  cosmological 

1  Epist.  i.  6,  8  and  ii.  4 ;  ii.  18,  22  and  iv.  3 ;  ii.  3  and  iii.  6". 

-  E.g.,  Epist.  ii.  27,  iv.  6,  v.  12  ;  Gosp.  iii.  36,  viii.  47. 

3  Epist.  iii.  13 ;  Gosp.  xv.  18  fol.,  xvii.  14. 

4  Gosp.  xvi.  33 ;  Epist.  v.  4  fol.  s  Gosp.  iii.  21 ;  Epist.  i.  6. 


§  19.]  THE    FIRST    EPISTLE    OF   JOHN  249 

conception  of  the  Logos  to  which  John  attaches  his  spe- 
culations on  the  nature  of  Christ  in  the  prologue  to  the 
Gospel,1  the  Epistle  (i.  1)  inserts  the  religious  conception  of 
'  the  word  of  life '  or  '  the  word  of  God,'  which  is  meant  at 
any  rate  as  a  partial  personification.  The  Paraclete  whose 
advent  is  announced  in  the  Gospel 2  is  not  mentioned  in  the 
Epistle,  and  the  word  is  even  used  in  a  different  sense  in 
ii.  1.  Differences  in  vocabulary  are  also  to  be  found,  such 
as  that  the  Epistle  uses  the  phrase  Kowwvla  perd  TWOS 
four  times,  and  that,  too,  within  five  verses  (i.  3-7)  ;  while  in 
the  Gospel  there  is  no  trace  either  of  this  word  or  of  any 
other  derived  from  Koivwvslv.  But  these  differences  can 
nearly  all  be  explained  by  the  peculiar  objects  of  the  Epistle — 
objects  which  concentrated  the  writer's  attention  on  certain 
points  which  did  not  always  coincide  with  the  favourite  themes 
of  the  Gospel.  And  certainly  it  would  imply  a  preposterous 
idea  of  the  relationship  between  the  Epistle  and  the  Gospel,  to 
suppose  that  the  former  was  tacked  on  to  the  latter  as  a  sort  of 
letter  of  recommendation.  The  Epistle  is  concerned  with 
other  objects  than  the  Gospel,  and  moreover  in  so  persistent 
and  one-sided  a  manner  that  it  is  impossible  to  think  of  the 
Gospel  and  the  Epistle  as  simultaneous  productions.  If 
they  are  separated  in  time,  the  last  ground  for  doubting  the 
identity  of  their  writers  disappears,  for  it  would  be  more 
than  foolish  to  expect  an  author  to  confine  himself  in  a 
later  work  to  exactly  the  same  material  as  he  had  used  per- 
haps five  years  before.  The  question  as  to  whether  the 
Epistle  or  the  Gospel  is  the  earlier  work  is  not  particularly 
important,  when  we  have  once  recognised  the  fact  that  no 
skill  in  imitation  and  no  mere  school-connection  could  ever 
have  produced  a  similarity  so  all-pervading  as  exists  between 
the  Gospel  of  John  and  this  Epistle  ;  but  by  far  the  more 
probable  assumption  is  that  the  Epistle  was  a  later  work 
from  the  hand  of  the  Evangelist.  He  produced  it  after  the 
earlier  and  greater  work,  not  because  he  wished  to  express 
the  main  idea  of  the  latter  in  more  popular,  though  at  the 
same  time  dogmatic,  form,  and  thus  to  fix  it  more  firmly  in  his 
readers'  memory,  but  because  his  Gospel  and  his  conception 

1  i.  1  fol.  -  Chaps,  xiv-xvi. 


AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  m. 

of  Christianity  were  now  being  seriously  threatened  by  the 
Gnostics,  who  actually  employed  some  of  his  formulae  in  order 
to  recommend  themselves  to  the  ignorant,  and  who  in  effect 
found  many  points  of  agreement  between  their  views  and  his. 
For  his  *  apology  '  he  chose  the  epistolary  form  which  Paul  had 
raised  to  honour,  although  without  making  any  material 
changes  in  his  style  to  suit  it. 


§  20.  The  Shorter  Epistles  of  John 

[Cf.  works  mentioned  in  §  19 ;  also  A.  Harnack,  '  Uber  den 
3tcn  Johannesbrief,'  in  the  '  Texte  und  Unters.  zur  altchr.  Lit.'  xv. 
3,  1897.] 

1.  These  two  Epistles,  which  resemble  one  another  very 
closely  in  outward  form,  return  to  a  more  distinct  epistolary 
style  ;  they  possess  both  address  and  final  greeting,  and  in  both 
the  writer  calls  himself  the  '  Presbyter,'  although  in  2.  the 
addressee  is  '  the  elect  Kvpia  and  her  children,'  and  in  3. 
1  Gaius  the  beloved.'  This  parallel  in  3.  1  might  at  first 
sight  lead  us  to  suppose  that  the  addressee  of  2.  was  also  an 
individual  Christian,  who  was  perhaps  named  Kyria,  or  else 
whose  name  was  left  unmentioned,  in  which  case  the  word 
must  be  translated  'lady.'  But  nowadays  it  is  almost 
universal  to  take  the  word  *  lady  '  as  referring  figuratively  to 
a  community  of  the  Lord  (a  single  Christian  community  accord- 
ing to  verse  13),  in  which  again  the  whole  of  Christendom 
might  be  symbolised.  For  the  writer  could  scarcely  have 
called  a  Christian  lady  of  his  time  '  beloved  by  all  them  that 
know  the  truth,'  even  allowing  for  the  greatest  extravagance  of 
style.  According  to  verse  4,  her  children  must  have  been 
unusually  numerous,  and  this  verse  can  only  be  made  to  agree 
with  verse  1,  by  assuming  that  there  the  word  *  children '  is 
used  in  a  narrower  sense  than  here.  The  use  of  both  singular 
and  plural  in  addressing  this  '  lady  '  *  also  favours  such  an 
interpretation,  and  moreover  the  chief  contents  of  the 
Epistle  are  by  no  means  private  in  character.  But  precisely 
because  the  matter  of  the  Epistle  is  suited  to  the  whole 
Church,  and  not  merely  to  a  single  community,  and  since  the 

1   Singular  in  vv.  4,  5  and  13  ;  plural  in  vv.  G,  8,  10  and  12. 


§  20.]  THE    SHORTER    KPISTLKS    OF   JOHN  251 

author  would  scarcely  have  wished  it  seriously  to  be  restricted 
to  a  single  community,  he  might  just  as  well  have  intended 
to  address  an  individual  Christian  matron  under  the  name 
of  Kyria  as  an  individual  Christian  brother  under  that  of 
Gaius,  and  the  difficulties  might  be  explained  by  supposing 
that  the  addresses  are  fictitious.  The  epistolary  form  led 
him  to  write  to  individuals,  but  he  intended  that  these  writings 
should  have  a  *  catholic  '  circulation. 

Besides  the  address  and  ending,  2.  John  consists  only  of,  a 
plea  to  its  recipients  to  walk  according  to  the  commandments 
of  God,  especially  in  the  matter  of  mutual  love,  and,  in 
defiance  of  all  Antichrists  who  denied  the  incarnate  Christ, 
to  stand  fast  in  the  teaching  of  Christ.1  The  false  teacher 
was  not  to  be  received  into  their  houses,  nor  even  to  be  given 
a  greeting.2  This  last  piece  of  advice  is  the  only  part  peculiar 
to  the  Epistle,  and  we  may  conclude  that  the  writer's  object 
was  to  establish  it  as  a  principle  with  regard  to  the  treat- 
ment of  heretics. 

The  Third  Epistle  has,  after  its  address,  an  introduction :{ 
which  reminds  us  of  the  Pauline  prefaces — an  expression  of  the 
writer's  joy,  that,  as  others  had  borne  witness,  Gaius  '  walked 
in  the  truth.'  Following  on  this  he  praises  him  for  having 
received  passing  brethren  in  a  friendly  manner,  thereby  ren- 
dering a  service  to  the  truth  they  represented.4  Unhappily, 
this  was  not  the  case  with  Diotrephes,  who,  from  a  desire  for 
personal  supremacy,  had  received  neither  the  brethren  nor  a 
letter  written  by  the  author,5  and  had  expelled  from  the  church 
others  who  were  willing  to  do  so.  It  was  to  be  hoped  that 
Gaius  would  not  follow  his  example.6  Verse  12  gives  a  glowing 
testimony  to  Demetrius,  from  which,  however,  we  do  not  learn 
whether  the  writer  means  to  recommend  him  to  the  hospitality 
of  Gaius,  or  as  a  trustworthy  ally  in  the  church.  The  letter 
ends  with  the  same  formulae  as  the  Second  Epistle. 

The  Gaius  of  the  Third  Epistle  can  be  identified  as  little  as 
the  Diotrephes  or  the  Demetrius,  for,  considering  the  fre- 
quency of  the  name,  it  would  be  almost  childish  to  suppose 
that  he  was  the  same  as  the  Gaius  mentioned  by  Paul  in 

1  Vv.  4-9.  -  Vv.  10  fol.  3  Vv.  2-4. 

3  Vv.  5-8.  -  Vv.  9  and  10.  6  Ver.  11. 


252      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  m. 

1.  Corinthians  '  and  Eomans  2 ;  but  when  we  consider  that 
this  was  a  time  of  which  we  know  practically  nothing,  it 
would  indeed  be  a  marvel  if  he  could  be  identified.  Taking 
the  Second  Epistle  into  account,  however,  we  seem  justified  in 
assuming  that  all  three  were  imaginary  persons  (verse  11, 
for  instance,  does  not  fit  the  description  of  Gains  in  vv.  2-6,  in 
the  least,  and  the  tenses  of  3,  5  fol.  betray  the  hollowness  of 
the  assumed  situation)  ;  thus  the  only  object  of  the  Epistle 
would  appear  to  have  been  to  urge  as  a  sacred  duty  the  cordial 
reception  and  entertainment  of  brethren  travelling  in  the 
service  of  the  Gospel,  and  to  unmask  the  lust  of  power  which, 
at  the  expense  of  truth,  and  solely  in  order  to  shut  out  all 
external  influences  from  its  neighbourhood,  did  not  fulfil  this 
duty  and  spurned  even  the  highest  of  all  authorities. 

2.  We  can  only  dispute  the  view  that  both  Epistles  spring 
from  the  same  writer,  if  we  consider  the  one  to  be  the  slavish 
imitation  of  the  other,  and  in  that  case  the  decision  as  to 
whether  2.  or  3.  were  the  earlier  could  only  be  purely  arbi- 
trary. I  hold  it  probable  that  they  were  written  contempora- 
neously, for  none  but  a  Chancery  clerk  could  have  clung  so 
closely  to  his  epistolary  formulae  as  to  give  to  two  Epistles 
written  at  different  periods  an  appearance  so  similar  as  that 
possessed  by  2.  and  3.  John  (with  the  exception  of  the  verses 
dealing  with  the  special  subjects  in  each).  They  show 
the  Johannine  type  in  phrases  like  '  to  know  the  truth,' 3 
'  to  be  of  God,' 4  <  to  have  God,'  '  to  have  both  the  Father 
and  the  Son,'"'  and  also  in  such  unimportant  expressions 
as  '  that  your  joy  may  be  fulfilled.' G  The  words  of  3.  12, '  thou 
knowest  that  our  witness  is  true,'  remind  us  particularly  of  the 
Gospel,7  but  both  Epistles,  and  particularly  the  Second,  are  still 
more  closely  related  to  the  First  Epistle,  for  vv.  2.  4-9  are 
in  reality  nothing  but  a  short  extract  from  that  Epistle,  while 
the  letter  mentioned  in  3. /written  either  to  the  whole  Church 
or  to  a  community,  and  which  Diotrephes  would  not  receive, 
would  also  seem  to  refer  with  great  probability  to  the  First 

1  i.  14.  "  xvi.  23.  a  2nd  Epist.  1 ;  cf.  Gosp.  viii.  32. 

4  3rd  Epist.  11.  5  2nd  Epist.  9. 

•  2nd  Epist.  12 ;  cf.  1st  Epist.  i.  4. 

7  v.  31  fol.,  viii.  13  fol.,  xix.  35,  and  esp.  xxi.  25.  "  Ver.  9 


§  i>0.]  THE   SHORTER   EPISTLES   OF   JOHN  253 

Epistle.  But  it  might  just  as  easily  be  taken  as  referring  to 
the  Second,  and  in  this  case  the  fiction  becomes  unmistakable, 
for  no  one  in  real  life  would  write  an  Epistle  like  2.  John  to  a 
community  the  ruler  of  which — as  the  writer  himself  knew 
and  mentioned  in  a  simultaneous  letter  to  a  personal  friend 
in  that  community — would  not  receive  his  Epistle,  but  had 
actually  put  himself  in  a  position  of  impious  antagonism 
to  him. 

The  indications  as  to  the  date  of  the  Epistles  are  but  scanty, 
though  what  we  have  said  with  regard  to  the  First  Epistle 
holds  good  of  the  Second  ;  a  somewhat  later  stage  in  the  develop- 
ment of  ecclesiastical  orthodoxy  is  implied  by  the  emphasis 
given  to  the  injunction  to  'abide  in  the  teaching,'  and  the 
absolute  condemnation  of  those  who  '  go  onward.'  As  to  the 
Third  Epistle  it  is  not  necessary  to  follow  Harnack  in  consider- 
ing it  as  an  important  document  dating  from  the  period  of  the 
struggle  of  the  old  patriarchal  mission-organisation  with  the 
individual  communities  and  their  tendency  towards  consolida- 
tion ;  but  we  may  probably  take  Diotrephes  as  a  representative 
of  the  monarchical  aspirations  in  the  communities,  and  of  the 
mistrust  of  the  wandering  teachers  which  soon  prevailed  in 
the  whole  Church  ;  we  can  therefore  scarcely  date  our  Epistles 
before  the  years  100-125. 

The  tradition  tells  us  that  the  writer  of  2.  and  3.  John  was 
identical  with  the  writer  of  1.  John  and  the  Gospel  of  John. 
Many  objections,  however,  have  been  raised  against  this.  The 
two  former,  after  all,  stand  much  closer  to  one  another 
than  to  the  longer  writings,  and  their  resemblance  to 
these  latter  may  be  explained  by  their  mental  dependence  on 
them,  and  by  the  fact  that  their  author  may  have  spent  a  con- 
siderable period  in  the  Johannine  atmosphere.  The  shorter 
Epistles  possess  much  that  does  not  occur  in  1.  John  and  the 
Gospel :  not  merely  the  words  (fnXonpcorsvsiv  and  psXav,  to 
which  no  one  has  the  right  to  expect  any  parallels,  but  phrases 
like  E^dprjv  \lav,1  ffXsTrsrs  ECLVTOVS?  aTro\aiJL/3dv£iv  fjLicrdov' 
7rX?/p77,2  avvEpyol  ywa)/jL£0d  TLVI?  all  of  which  remind  us  of 
the  Synoptics  or  of  Paul.  Even  in  the  extract  from  the  First 
Epistle  in  2.  4-9  there  are  some  remarkable  differences,  such 

1  2nd  Ep.  4  and  3rd  Ep.  3.  -  2nd  Ep.  8.  3  3rd  Ep.  8. 


254      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  in. 

as  the  words  7r\dvo?  and  ir\dvoL  in  verse  7 :  the  fact  that  the 
Antichrist  is  only  spoken  of  in  the  singular  1 ;  the  mention  of 
the  danger  of  losing  '  the  things  which  have  been  wrought,' 2 
the  reference  to  the  *  full  reward,'  and  the  excommunication  of 
the  man  who  *  goeth  onward,'  or  who  '  taketh  the  lead ' 
(TTpodywv).  Finally,  when  we  consider  the  great  difference 
between  the  epistolary  garb  of  the  First  Epistle  and  that  of  the 
other  two,  and  the  fact  that  the  latter  found  their  way  into 
the  Canon  later  than  the  First  Epistle  and  separately  from  it, 
we  can  at  any  rate  understand  that  doubts  might  be  entertained 
of  the  tradition  which  sought  to  ascribe  all  four  writings  to 
the  same  hand.  On  the  other  hand,  the  differences  between 
the  two  shorter  Epistles  and  the  longer  are  not  more  consider- 
able than  between  the  latter  and  the  Gospel.  I  see  no  reason 
left  for  ascribing  the  three  Epistles  of  John  to  more  than  one 
author ;  if  we  may  assume  that  he  wrote  the  last  two  as  a 
supplement  a  few  years  after  the  First  Epistle — first,  in  the 
Second  Epistle,  to  point  out  more  particularly  the  duty  of 
separation  from  the  false  teachers ;  then,  in  the  Third,  to 
give  a  forcible  recommendation  to  a  form  of  the  practice  of 
brotherly  love  which  was  specially  important,  though  often 
entirely  ignored  or  its  necessity  contested. 

One  question  only  remains  :  why  the  unknown  writer,  who 
was  apparently  well  content  to  remain  partially  anonymous  in 
the  First  Epistle,  now  reveals  himself  in  the  Second  and  Third  ; 
and,  if  so,  why  he  does  not  come  forward  simply  under  his  own 
name,  but  adopts  a  title  which  might  mean  anything,  and  there- 
fore tells  us  next  to  nothing— the  title  of  Presbyter.  The  first 
became  necessary  when  instead  of  the  sermon  in  epistolary 
form  he  chose  the  form  of  the  occasional  letter.  But  how 
can  the  vague  title  *  Presbyter '  be  coupled  in  the  nomi- 
native with  the  dative  '  to  Gaius '  ?  This  would  only  be 
possible  if  the  person  intended  was  known  to  everyone  in  the 
Christian  world  as  the  Presbyter  /car  ffo^/V,  and  perhaps 
better  known  by  this  title  than  by  his  own  name.  It  is  said 
that  there  was  such  an  '  Elder  '  of  the  name  of  John  in  the 
second  century.  Either  this  man  is  the  writer  of  our  Epistles, 
or  some  unknown  person  has  appropriated  his  name  in  order  to 

1  Verse  7.  2  Vers?  8. 


§  20.]  Till-)    SII01MT.K    KIMSTJ.KS    OP   JOHN 

secure  an  adequate  authority  for  his  disciplinary  instructions. 
Perhaps  he  had  heard  that  some  had  placed  his  first  epistle 
ad  acta,  and  therefore  determined  to  announce  more  defi- 
nitely whose  voice  it  was  that  had  demanded  a  hearing.  He 
attained  his  object.  A  hundred  years  later  the  shorter 
Epistles  were  always  quoted  as  the  Epistles  of  John  wherever 
they  were  known. 

For  further  particulars  of  this  Presbyter  see  below,  §  31. 


256        AN   INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT   [BOOK  n. 


BOOK  U 

THE   APOCALYPTIC   LITEBATURE   OF  THE 
NEW   TESTAMENT 

§  21.  A    General   Survey   of  Apocalyptic   Literature 

[Cf .  F.  Liicke's  '  Versuch  einer  vollstandigen  Einleitung  in  die 
Offenbarung  des  Johannes'  (1852) ;  E.  Schiirer's  '  Geschichte  des 
jiidischen  Volkes  im  Zeitalter  Jesu  Christi,'  vol.  iii.  pp.  181-273 ; 
Wellhausen's  '  Skizzen  und  Vorarbeiten/  vi.  pp.  215-249  (1899)  ; 
and  for  works  of  H.  Gunkel  and  W.  Bousset  see  next  section.  A 
good  translation  of  the  Jewish  Apocalypses  not  contained  in 
the  Old  Testament  has  been  made  by  Kautzsch,  in  his  '  Die 
Apokryphen  und  Pseudepigraphen  des  A.  T.'s,'  ii.  pp.  177-528 
(1900),  with  short  commentaries  and  introductions ;  the  general 
introduction  to  the  first  volume  (pp.  xx-xxiii)  should  also  be  con- 
sulted.] 

WHILE  the  Epistolary  literature  of  the  New  Testament  was 
created  by  Christianity  itself,  that  is  by  the  great  Christian 
Apostle  Paul,  without  any  dependence  on  existing  models,  and 
the  Gospels  and  Acts  were  written  in  a  form  naturally  arising 
from  the  needs  of  an  historical  religion — for  we  may  suppose 
that  even  if  no  one  had  ever  composed  an  historical  book 
before,  the  Saviour  would  have  been  described  in  much  this 
way  to  future  generations — the  Apocalyptic  writings  of  the 
New  Testament  belong  to  a  species  of  artistic  composition 
which  existed  long  beforehand,  which  grew  up  on  Jewish  soil 
and  was  finally  adopted  by  the  new  religion  without  any  essen- 
tial modifications.  It  is  true  that  only  one  such  book,  the 
Apocalypse  of  John,  has  found  its  way  into  the  New  Testament 
Canon  (or  has  remained  there  permanently),  but  there  are 
other  works  of  the  kind  which  have  laid  claim  to  a  like 


§  21.]    GENERAL   SURVEY   OF    APOCALYPTIC    LITERATURE      257 

consideration,  such  AS  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter,1  and  the 
'  Shepherd '  of  Hennas,-  and  this  form  of  edifying  literature 
was  for  centuries  exceedingly  popular  in  the  widest  Christian 
circles.  Professional  theologians  made  light  of  it,  but  the 
lower  orders  of  the  Christian  population  derived  from  it  much 
stimulus  to  their  imagination  and  material  for  their  religious 
thought. 

The  name  '  Apocalypse,'  which  many  books  of  this  class  do 
not  bear  from  the  beginning,  is  generally  applied  to  all  those 
writings  in  which  a  human  being  tells  the  story  of  what  had 
been  imparted  to  him  from  heaven  above,  under  circumstances 
of  miracle,  concerning  those  matters  and  problems  of  the 
other  world  which,  though  inaccessible  to  human  reason, 
are  of  all  the  greater  interest  on  that  account  to  the  pious 
heart.  Apocalyptic  elements  are  also  frequently  found  in 
books  of  another  class— e.g.  in  the  Psalms  of  Solomon,  in 
Jewish  books  of  legends,  and  so  on — and  this  naturally  enough, 
for  the  Apocalypse  does  not  merely  represent  a  branch  of 
literature^  but  rather  a  stage  in  the  development  of  the 
Israelitish  religion.  The  first  great  product  of  Apocalyptics 
was  the  Book  of  Daniel,  written  in  the  time  of  the  Maccabees 
about  the  year  166  B.C.  ;  all  later  examples  drew  from  it, 
most  of  them  consciously.  It  now  finds  its  place  among  the 
Prophets  of  the  Old  Testament,  and  perhaps  rightly  so,  for 
Apocalyptic  literature  is  in  reality  the  last  manifestation  of 
Old  Testament  Prophecy. 

Prophecy  found  itself  on  the  way  to  an  Apocalyptic  form  as 
soon  as,  from  Jeremiah  onwards,  it  was  compelled  to  abandon 
the  direct  action  of  man  on  man,  and  to  influence  its  genera- 
tion solely  through  the  medium  of  literature.  Ezekiel  in  the 
Captivity  is  already  "book-prophet  from  first  to  last.  In  other 
respects,  too,  he  shows  very  strongly  the  characteristics  of  an 
age  of  decadence  :  few  new  ideas  and  none  of  the  moral 
energy  of  the  old  stock,  but  in  their  place  an  imagination 
luxuriant  enough,  but  running  to  waste  in  a  tangle  of  barren 
weeds.  Vague  allegories  exercise  the  ingenuity  of  the  reader 
rather  than  guide  his  will  in  accordance  with  eternal  law.  The 
healthy  bond  between  Prophecy  and  the  living  history  of  the 

1  See  p.  2*3.  -  Written  at  Kome  about  140  A.D. 

B 


258       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [BOOK  n. 

people  has  been  severed,  nor  are  matters  mended   by   the 
return  of  half   the   exiles   to   Palestine,  for  Israel   remains 
divided  and  has  lost  the  free  disposal  of  its  own  affairs.     No 
Prophet  could  now  venture  to  deal  publicly  with  political  ques- 
tions, and  indeed  none  would  have  had  the  power,  for  the 
mental  horizon  and  the  interests  of  the  poor  downtrodden 
Palestinians  grew  narrower  year  by  year.     At  last — for  when 
the  aspect  of  the  present  is  too  dreary,  we  turn  our  eyes  to  the 
future  — the  best  of  them  had  little  left  but  the  hope  that  Israel 
would  one  day  be  restored  by  supernatural  intervention,  and 
would  be  suffered  to  attain  the  mastery  over  its  former  tyrants 
in  token  of  God's  approval  of  its  steadfast  faith.     And  they  did 
not  merely  turn  their  eyes  to  this  future  time,  they  invented 
an  art  of  calculating  the  precise  moment  of  its  appearance  by 
the  interpretation  of  ancient  prophecies,  such  as  that  of  the 
1  seventy  years  '  of  Jeremiah.     The  existing  world  they  gave 
over  to  the  Devil,  as  the  Children  of  God  had  been  compelled 
to  give  over  their  land  to  the  heathen  oppressor,  but  they 
yearned  with  all  the  more  feverish  expectation  for  that  future 
aeon   in   which,  after  fearful  judgments  on  the  guilty,   God 
would  at  last  carry  out  his  will  in  all  things,  great  and  small. 
This  one  idea  still  had  life ;  but,  partly  because  it  could  not 
be   freely   uttered    under    foreign   rule,   partly   because   the 
shrinkage  of  the  available  material  made  it  necessary  to  adopt 
new  forms  to  produce  the  old  effects,  and  partly  because  the 
inexpressible  could  not  from  its  very  nature  be  reproduced  with 
exactness  in  the  language  of  men,  it  became  the  custom  for 
those  who  spoke  or  wrote  on  this  subject  to  veil  their  thoughts, 
and  half  to  reveal  them  in  images,-  half  to  keep  them  back 
as  riddles.     This  explains  the  two  prime  characteristics  of 
this  last  phase  of  prophecy — the  overwhelming  stress  laid  on 
the  future  and  its  joys,  and  the  obscurity  of  the  form — the 
chequered,  fantastic  dress  — in  which  that  future  is  presented 
to  the  mind. 

Nor  is  this  half  prophetic,  half  poetic  literature  wholly 
without  grandeur.  Ideal  aims  sometimes  find  sublime  ex- 
pression, and  the  ethical  standpoint,  that  only  faith  wins 
God's  final  reward,  attains  due  recognition.  It  has  deserved 
well,  too,  of  the  community  which  it  sought  to  sustain  and 


§  21.]     GENERAL    SURVEY    OF    APOCALYPTIC    MTKRA'ITKK 

hold  together,  for  whenever  fear  and  despair  were  at  tln-ir 
height,  a  book  of  this  kind  would  almost  certainly  appear, 
arousing  new  courage  by  interpreting  the  present  calamities 
as  the  birth-pangs  of  the  glory  that  was  to  be.  Nevertheless, 
viewed  as  a  whole,  Apocalyptics  is  Prophecy  turned  senile, 
drawing  its  sustenance  from  one  interest  only,  and  working 
on  a  single  pattern.  Instead  of  creative  genius  we  have 
laborious  imitation  ;  only  by  yet  more  detailed  and  extrava- 
gant descriptions  of  the  final  Metamorphosis,  which  was  ever 
receding  further  into  the  future,  could  the  later  writer  excel 
the  earlier ;  the  mind  becomes  more  and  more  entangled  in 
the  subtleties  of  a  riotous  and  yet  calculating  imagination, 
till  at  last  it  becomes  a  mere  question  of  satisfying  the 
pseudo-religious  curiosity  and  pleasing  the  degenerate  taste 
of  the  time.  So  impotent  were  the  leading  spirits  of  this  age, 
indeed,  that  no  man  was  confident  enough  to  assume  the  office 
of  God's  messenger  in  his  own  name,  but  put  what  he  had  to 
say  into  the  mouth  of  some  famous  man  or  woman  of  old,  such 
as  the  legendary  Daniel,  Ezra,  Moses,  Noah,  a  Sibyl,  Enoch, 
Seth,  or  Adam.  One  of  these  personages  describes  to  his 
descendants  how  a  revelation  was  vouchsafed  to  him,  by  super- 
natural means,  of  the  life  and  condition  of  the  heavenly  world, 
of  God's  intentions  for  his  creatures,  and  especially  of  the 
course  of  history,  which,  after  an  age  of  bitter  disappointments 
for  the  just  and  of  overweening  insolence  on  the  part  of  the 
ungodly,  would  end  at  last  in  the  victory,  not  less  perfect  than 
sudden,  of  God  and  of  the  righteous.  This  end  the  Apocalyptic 
writer  usually  describes  as  near  at  hand,  and  his  own  place 
in  history  as  immediately  preceding  it ;  but  the  real  date  of 
these  professedly  primaeval  revelations  can  be  recognised  from 
the  fact  that  up  to  a  certain  point  the  predictions  of  the  Man 
of  God  correspond  in  some  degree  (and  towards  the  end  even  in 
points  of  detail)  to  the  true  historical  tradition,  while  after  that 
point  their  outlines  suddenly  become  blurred,  and  analogies 
with  the  actual  course  of  events  are  no  longer  to  be  found. 
The  former  class  came  within  the  author's  own  experience  or 
transmitted  knowledge ;  the  latter  he  expected  to  be  realised 
by  the  immediate  future,  and,  it  must  be  admitted,  expected 
generally  in  vain. 

S  2 


260       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [BOOK  n. 

With  the  appearance  of  Jesus,  this  form  of  prophecy  was 
in  principle  superseded.     Jesus  did  not  corue  forward  under 
another's  name,  he  spoke  freely  and  without  disguise — using 
images  only  to  facilitate  the  understanding  of  his  thought- 
he  sought  the   means  of  realising  the  Messianic  hopes,  not 
in  extravagant  descriptions   of   blessedness  to  come,  but  in 
warfare  against  the   false  piety  of  Pharisaism,  and  in  the 
establishment  of  a  healthy  relation  between  every  child  of 
God  and  its  Father.     And  his  Apostles  followed  his  example, 
especially  Paul  '  the  Apostle  ' ;  they  laboured  for  the  Gospel 
after  the  manner  of  the  genuine  Prophets,  and  we  can  only 
speak  of  a  Pauline  l  or  a  Gospel  -  '  Apocalypse '  cum  grano 
salis,  in  so  far  as  in  the  painting  of  the  '  last  days  '  some  of 
their  colours  were  taken  from  Jewish  Apocalyptics.     But  we 
could  not  expect  that   those   Christians   who   as   Jews   had 
owed  their  spiritual  edification  mainly  to  Apocalypses  should 
undergo  a  complete  change  of  taste ;    and  the  general  con- 
dition of   things  rather  favoured  the  adoption  of  this  form 
of  religious  literature  on  the  part  of  the  new  religion,  for 
not  less  eagerly  were  the  Christians  now  looking  forward  to 
the  Parusia  of  Christ  than  had  the  Jews  in  former  times 
awaited   the  appearance  of  the   Messiah.      Soon,  too,  their 
condition   became   one   of    not   less   oppression   and   almost 
greater  hopelessness  than  that  of  Israel  in  its  worst  days. 
Add  to  this  that  in  all  religiously  inclined  sections  of  the  life- 
weary  world  of  those  days,  and  not  in  Jewish  circles  only,  we 
may  reckon  upon  finding  a  particular  interest  taken  in  books 
with    an  apparatus   of  mystery  and  enigmatical   predictions 
concerning  the  end  of  all  things.     So  it  came  about  that  the 
Apocalyptic   genre   was   soon   cultivated  with   eagerness   by 
:hristian  authors  also.     Sometimes  an  old  Jewish  Apocalypse 
was  recast  from  the  Christian  point  of  view,  sometimes  an 
entirely  new  one  was  written ;    and  of  these  last  the  oldest 
that  has  come  down  to  us  is  the  Revelation  of  John. 


2.  Thes<.  ii.  1-12. 


-  Matt.  xxiv. 


22.]  THK    REVELATION    OF   JOHN  261 


§  22.  The  Revelation  of  John 

[Of.  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  vol.  xvi.,  by  W.  Bousset,  ed.  5,  1896, 
his  strong  point  the  methodological  sections  in  the  Introduction 
(pp.  141-170).  Hand-Commentar,  vol.  iv.,  '  Die  johanneischen 
Schrifte,'  by  Holtzmann  himself  (ed.  2,  1893).  The  numerous 
special  commentaries  on  Revelation,  especially  those  of  E.  Heng- 
stenberg  (ed.  2,  1861),  T.  Kliefoth  (1874),  and  H.  Fuller  (1874) 
are  more  interesting  to  the  student  of  Church  history  than  in- 
structive for  the  interpretation  of  the  book  itself.  Since  1882  the 
interest  of  scholars  has  been  one-sidedly  applied  to  investigating 
the  construction  and  date  of  the  Apocalypse.  Among  the  countless 
publications  of  this  class  (many  of  which  were  mere  abortions) 
R  Spitta's  '  Die  Offenbarung  des  Johannes '  (1889)  is  valuable 
for  its  contributions  towards  a  better  understanding  of  details. 
See  also  H.  Gunkel's  '  Schopfung  und  Chaos  in  Urzeit  und  Endzeit ' 
(1895),  a  work  intended  to  create  a  new  epoch  in  our  understand- 
ing of  Revelation. 

1.  The  Apocalpyse,  which  only  slightly  exceeds  1.  Corin- 
thians in  bulk,  used  at  one  time  to  be  much  admired  for  its  sym- 
metrical construction,  but  in  reality  it  is  extremely  difficult  to 
summarise  its  contents  briefly  and  yet  with  tolerable  complete- 
ness. The  first  three  verses  form  the  superscription,  declar- 
ing the  work  to  be  a  Revelation  which  Jesus  Christ  had  *  sent 
and  signified  '  by  the  command  of  God  through  his  angel  to 
John,  and  dealing  with  the  *  things  which  must  shortly  come 
to  pass.'  The  book  was  intended  for  the  *  servants  of  Jesus/ 
and  they  were  to  '  keep  the  things  which  were  written  there- 
in.' Then  follows  a  preface  in  which  John,  the  transmitter 
of  this  revelation,  addresses  a  solemn  greeting  to  the  '  seven 
churches  which  are  in  Asia,'  while  the  next  verse  (i.  8)  is 
actually  put  into  the  mouth  of  God.  In  verse  9  the  writer 
begins  the  story  of  how  he  was  seized  by  the  Holy  Ghost  one 
*  Lord's  day '  on  the  island  of  Patmos,  and  received  the 
charge  to  write  down  all  that  he  was  about  to  see  and  send 
the  book  to  the  Churches  of  Ephesus,  Smyrna,  Pergamum, 
Thyatira,  Sardes,  Philadelphia  and  Laodicea.  In  seeking  for 
the  giver  of  the  charge,  he  beheld  standing  in  the  midst  of 
seven  golden  candlesticks  <  one  like  unto  a  son  of  man,'  who 


26^      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [BOOK  n. 

held  in  his  right  hand  seven  stars ;  this  figure  declares  him- 
self to  be  the  Eisen  One,  and  dictates  seven  letters  to  the 
angels  of  the  above-named  churches  of  Asia.  The  letters  con- 
sist partly  in  a  recognition  of  the  Christian  faith,  the  patient 
endurance  under  persecution,  and  the  opposition  to  false 
Apostles  shown  by  the  communities,  partly  in  a  sharp  reproof 
of  their  loss  of  zeal  (this  to  Ephesus,  Sardes,  and  especially  the 
'lukewarm'  Laodicea),  their  tendency  to  Nicolaitisrn  (especially 
Pergamum),  and  to  the  Antinomianism  of  the  prophetess 
Jezebel  (this  to  Thyatira  only),  and  lastly  in  reminding  them 
of  the  swift,  unheralded  return  of  Christ. 

From  this  vestibule  we  enter  the  main  temple  of  the 
visions  in  chapter  iv.  The  seer  is  borne  up  to  heaven  and 
there  beholds  the  throne  of  God,  surrounded  by  the  thrones 
of  four-and- twenty  Elders,  and  in  the  midst  of  it  the  four 
'creatures'  of  Ezekiel — the  Lion,  the  Calf,  the  Man,  and 
the  Eagle — who  vie  with  the  Elders  in  praising  God.  Next,1 
he  beholds  a  book  sealed  with  seven  seals,  which  no  one  is 
found  worthy  to  open,  until  the  Lamb  with  seven  horns  and 
seven  eyes  approaches,  amid  the  rejoicing  of  all  the  heavenly 
host,  and  breaks  the  seals  one  by  one.  With  the  breaking  of 
the  first  four,2  the  Parthian  invader,  the  sword  of  Rome, 
famine  and  pestilence  are  let  loose  upon  the  world  ;  with  the 
fifth, :i  the  souls  of  the  murdered  saints  raise  their  cry  for 
vengeance  and  are  consoled  by  the  promise  of  the  approach- 
ing Day  of  Judgment ;  the  breaking  of  the  sixth  produces  a 
great  earthquake  whereby  the  whole  fabric  of  the  world  is 
shattered  4 ;  but  before  it  falls  twelve  thousand  servants  of 
God  out  of  each  of  the  twelve  tribes  of  Israel  are  sealed  upon 
the  forehead,5  and  the  seer  beholds  a  countless  multitude  of 
the  blessed  of  all  nations,  believers  in  Christ  who  had  come 
unspotted  out  of  the  great  tribulation,  standing  before  the 
throne  of  God.6  Only  now  is  the  seventh  seal  opened,7  upon 
which  there  follows  a  silence  in  heaven  about  the  space  of 
half  an  hour.  Then  there  appear  before  God  seven  angels 
with  seven  trumpets,  and  after  the  prayers  of  the  saints  had 
'  gone  up  before  God '  the  first  four  sound  their  blasts.8 

1  Chap.  v.  -  vi.  1-8.  3  vi.  9-11.  '  vi.  12-17. 

5  vii  1-8.  •  vii.  9-17.  7  viii.  1.  «  viii.  G-12. 


, 


§  22.]  THE   REVELATION    OF   JOHN  263 

This  produces  fearful  convulsions  upon  the  earth,  and  a  third 
part  of  everything   affected  is  utterly  destroyed.     Then  the 
first   of   the  three   '  woes  '   (ovai)   which  are  announced  l  to 
follow  the  sounding  of  the  last  three  trumpets  is  fulfilled  at 
the  blast  of  the  fifth 2 ;  a  miraculously  created  swarm  of  locusts 
under  their  king  Abaddon  (or  Apollyon)  is  sent  to  torment 
for  the  space  of  five  months  all  who  had  not  received  the  seal. 
At  the  blast  of  the  sixth  trumpet 3  the  four  angels  bound  in 
the  great  river  Euphrates  are  let  loose,  that  they  may  slay  the 
third  part  of  mankind  with  their  hordes  of  horsemen  :  never- 
theless  the  residue  does  not  repent.      Chap.  x.  prepares  us 
for  the  last  act,  that  of  the  Seventh  trumpet,  in  which  tho 
'  mystery  of  God '  will  be  fulfilled.4     John  is  bidden  therein  to 
eat  a  little  book  '  sweet  in  the  mouth,  but  bitter  in  the  belly/ 
and  after  this  to  prophesy5  concerning  the  Holy  City — how 
it  should  be  trodden  under  foot  by  the  heathen,  with   the 
exception  of  the  Temple,  for  forty-two  months,  while  the  two 
prophets  ( '  witnesses  ' )  of  God,  armed  with  miraculous  powers, 
should  prophesy  for  the  same  space  of  time.     Then,  however, 
these  two  were  to  be  killed  by  the  '  beast  that  cometh  up  out 
of  the  abyss,'  and  for  three  days  and  a  half  their  bodies  were 
to  lie  unburied,  but  at  the  end  of  that  time  they  would  receive 
new  life  and  be  borne  up  to  heaven,  while  a  terrible  earthquake 
destroyed  seven  thousand  persons.     This  was  the  second  Woe. 
Now  at  last  the  seventh  trumpet  sounds,6  the  foundation  of 
the  Kingdom  of  Christ  is  celebrated  in  Heaven,  and  the  end  of 
the  world  appears  to  have  come. 

But  no,  the  visions  proceed ;  in  chap.  xii.  there  appears 
in  Heaven  a  woman  in  travail,  and  a  dragon  with  seven 
crowned  heads  and  ten  horns  stands  before  her  ready  to 
devour  her  child.  But  this  child,  the  Messiah,  is  caught  up 
to  God,  and  Michael  casts  the  dragon  and  his  angels  out  of 
Heaven  for  ever,  nor  can  he  harm  the  mother  of  the  child  on 
earth — for  the  earth  befriends  her — but  only  the  rest  of  her 
seed.  Chap.  xiii.  tells  how  a  beast  rose  up  from  the  sea 
with  ten  crowned  horns  and  seven  heads,  one  of  which  was 
1  smitten  unto  death,  but  his  death-stroke  was  healed  ' ;  this 

'  Verse  13.  2  ix.  1-12.  »  ix.  13-21. 

x.  7.  5  xi.  1-13.  8  xi.  15-19. 


264      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [HOOK  n. 

\ 

beast  the  dragon  endows  with  all  his  power  and  might  for 
two-and-forty  months,  and  it  makes  war  on  the  saints  and  is 
worshipped  by  all  other  dwellers  on  the  earth.  This,  however, 
is  in  consequence  of  the  deceitfulness  of  a  second  beast,  who 
comes  up  out  of  the  earth  and  has  '  two  horns  like  unto  a 
lamb,'  though  he  speaks  like  a  dragon.  By  his  wonderful 
signs  he  induces  mankind  actually  to  worship  the  image  of 
the  water-beast  as  divine,  and  to  allow  themselves  to  be  marked 
with  his  name,  which  was  contained  in  the  number  'six 
hundred  and  sixty  and  six.'  Meanwhile  the  Lamb,  with  his 
'  hundred  and  forty  and  four  thousand '  saints,  his  band  of 
virgins,  is  standing  on  the  mount  of  Zion,1  and  an  angel 
proclaims  aloud  an  eternal  gospel,  saying  '  with  a  great  voice '  : 
*  The  hour  of  judgment  is  come.' 2  A  second  angel  announces 
the  fall  of  Babylon,3  a  third  utters  a  threat  of  eternal  torment 
against  the  worshippers  of  the  Beast  and  of  his  image,4  while 
to  those  who  had  died  in  the  Lord,  heavenly  rest  is  promised. 
The  Son  of  Man  is  already  at  hand,  with  the  insignia  of  the 
world's  judge,  and  the  sickle  begins  its  work  upon  the  earth.5 
Here  the  scene  changes  once  more,6  and  seven  angels  appear 
with  the  seven  last  plagues.  As  they  step  out  of  the  heavenly 
temple  they  are  given  '  seven  golden  bowls  full  of  the  wrath  of 
God,'  which  they  pour  out  one  by  one,  to  the  fearful  destruc- 
tion of  mankind 7 ;  nevertheless,  men  do  not  repent,  but 
gather  themselves  together  at  Harmagedon  round  the  Dragon 
and  the  two  beasts  for  the  last  fight  with  God.  Here 8  the 
seer  unexpectedly  turns  his  gaze  towards  Babylon — as  in 
chap.  xi.  towards  Jerusalem — Babylon,  the  synonym  of  Rome, 
the  great  harlot,  whose  deeds  of  shame  and  whose  fall 
and  destruction  are  described  in  much  detail ;  a  hymn  of 
praise  is  raised  in  Heaven  over  the  fall  of  Babel,  and  finally 
we  are  shown  the  triumphal  progress  of  the  Word  of  God, 
ending  with  the  overthrow  of  the  Beast  and  the  false  prophet, 
and  the  slaughter  of  all  their  confederates.9  Upon  this  we  are 
briefly  told  10  of  the  thousand  years  during  which  the  dragon, 

1  xiv.  1-6.  2  xiv.  6  and  7.  8  xiv.  8. 

4  Vv.  9-13.  *  Vv.  14-20.  6  Ch.  xv. 

T  Ch.  xvi.  •  xvii-xix.  10.  9  xix.  1-21. 
>•  xx.  1-6. 


§  22.]  THE   REVELATION    OF   JOHN  1(\~) 

Satan,  was  to  lie  bound  in  the  abyss,  while  the  saints  of  Christ 
take  part  in  the  preliminary  resurrection  and  hold  sway  with 
their  master  over  the  earth.  But  at  the  end  of  the  thousand 
years  Satan  breaks  forth  once  more  '  and  gathers  his  host 
together,  Gog  and  Magog,  at  the  ends  of  the  earth ;  but  the 
danger  does  not  last  long,  and  he  is  hurled  once  and  for  all 
into  the  lake  of  tire  :  upon  this  the  day  of  universal  resur- 
rection and  of  judgment  dawns,  which  puts  an  end  for  ever  to 
death  and  to  the  kingdom  of  the  dead.  Then  we  have  a 
description 2  of  the  glories  of  the  new  heaven  and  the  new 
earth,  and  especially  of  the  New  Jerusalem,  and  with  this  the 
Apocalyptic  material  is  exhausted,  and  the  last  verses  :i  form  a 
literary  ending  to  correspond  with  chapter  i.  The  ascending 
scale  of  authorities  which  vouch  for  the  trustworthiness  of 
this  inviolable  book — John  himself,  the  Angel  who  conducts 
him,  and  finally  Jesus  Christ— is  once  more  pointed  out,  and 
the  longing  for  the  Parusia,  for  the  coming  of  the  Lord 
Jesus,  is  fanned  to  fever-heat. 

2.  The  connection  between  this  Apocalypse  and  those  of 
Jewish  origin  is  unmistakable.  In  both  we  find  the  same 
concentration  of  interest  upon  the  '  last  things,'  the  same 
promises  of  a  speedy  revolution  in  favour  of  the  righteous, 
the  same  confusion  between  things  past  and  things  to  come,4 
the  same  fantastic  and  magical  pictures  of  approaching 
events,  and  the  same  hesitating  and  partial  interpretation  of  all 
manner  of  '  Mysteries  ' 5  and  '  Wisdoms.' 6  Here,  however,  the 
recipient  of  the  revelation  is  not  a  man  of  hoary  antiquity, 
but  a  Christian,  by  name  John.  He  reckons  himself  among 
the  Prophets,7  and  demands  a  respectful  recognition  for  his 
book,8  and  of  course  he  has  no  doubt  as  to  the  correctness 
of  his  ideas  on  the  subject  of  the  things  to  come.  Never- 
theless, the  old  discussion  as  to  whether  the  book  can  best 
be  interpreted  from  the  point  of  view  of  contemporary,  eccle- 
siastical (or  rather,  imperial)  history,  or  from  that  of  Eschato- 
logy,  is  entirely  behind  the  times.  Any  extravagance  could 

1  xx.  7-15.  2  xxi.  1-xxii.  5. 

3  xxii.  6-21.  "  E.g.,  xi.  2,  xiii.  2-5,  xvii.  9  fol. 

5  i.  20,  x.  7,  xvii.  5  and  7.  a  xiii.  18,  xvii.  9. 

7  xxii.  9  and  18,  i.  3.  8  i.  3.  xxii.  9  and  18  fol. 


266      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT      [BOOK  n. 

find  its  authority  in  this  book,  so  long  as  people  started 
from  the  false  assumption  that  the  author's  visions  had 
already  been,  or  would  hereafter  be  literally  fulfilled.  The 
Apocalypse  of  John  was  taken  out  of  the  sphere  to  which 
it  belonged,  and,  simply  because  it  had  happened  to  remain 
within  the  New  Testament,  was  judged  by  quite  a  different 
standard  from  that  which  was  applied  to  similar  works,  like 
the  Book  of  Enoch,  4th  Ezra,  or  the  '  Shepherd  '  of  Hermas. 
Science,  however,  cannot  tolerate  such  a  proceeding,  and 
while  she  is  quite  ready  to  acknowledge  the  peculiarities  of 
this  Christian  work  and  the  influence  which  the  new  faith 
exerted  over  the  imagination  of  the  writer,  she  cannot  ignore 
the  obvious  fact  that  here,  as  in  all  Apocalyptic  writings, 
a  picture  of  future  events  has  been  constructed  out  of  the 
hopes  and  wishes  of  a  part  at  least  of  the  Christianity  of  that 
time,  and  with  the  help  of  its  accumulated  store  of  hatreds, 
loves,  hopes,  ideals  and  fanciful  imaginings.  For  who  is  there 
who  seriously  maintains  to-day  the  idea  of  a  thousand  years' 
Kingdom  of  God  on  earth  '  ?  No,  the  enduring  religious 
value  of  the  book  lies  in  the  energy  of  faith  which  it  displays, 
in  the  splendid  certainty  of  its  conviction  that  God's  cause 
must  ever  be  the  best,  and  is  inseparable  from  the  cause 
of  Jesus  Christ,  and  in  the  pithy  and  striking  aphorisms 
scattered  through  it,2  which  have  long  since  become  an  integral 
part  of  our  literature  of  edification ;  but  it  would  be  wholly 
inadmissible  to  treat  the  details  of  the  writer's  fancy  as  an 
authentic  source  either  for  a  history  of  the  past  or  of  the  future. 
The  Apocalypse  of  John  is,  moreover,  the  artificial  product 
of  study  and  reflection  ;  its  ecstatic  visions  are  merely  literary 
trappings,  not  actual  experiences.  Otherwise  we  should  be 
obliged  to  assume  that  the  writing  of  it  had  always,  by  some 
miraculous  means,  been  simultaneous  with  the  author's  seeing 
and  hearing,  for  in  xxii.  9  the  book  appears  to  be  already 
finished  when  the  visions  come  to  an  end.  The  position  of 
the  seer  is  not  made  quite  clear :  sometimes  he  is  in  heaven,3 
sometimes  on  the  earth,4  and  the  artificiality  of  the  situation 
is  no  less  significantly  shown  by  the  fact  that  he  frequently 


1  xx.  1-6. 
iv.  1 


•  E.g.,  ii.  10f  ,  iii.  11  and  19-21,  xii.  11,  xiv.  13  and  xxi.  4. 
4  Chaps,  x  and  xi. 


§  22.]  THK    REVELATION    OF    JOHN  267 

relapses  from  the  past  tense,  which  alone  would  have  suited 
his  presumable  experiences,  into  the  future.1  That  he  also 
professes  to  have  seen  things  which  are  not  to  be  seen  under 
any  circumstances,  such  as  the  voice  of  the  Son  of  Man,2  or 
the  way  in  which  the  four  beasts  around  the  throne  of  God 
cried  Holy,  Holy,  Holy,  '  having  no  rest  day  and  night,' :t  is 
at  most  a  defect  in  expression  ;  for  the  words  '  I  saw  '  introduce 
the  whole  body  of  his  experiences  from  the  moment  his  visions 
begin.  But  it  is  more  curious  that  he  should  have  seen  all 
four  sides  of  the  throne  of  God  equally  well  from  where  he 
stood,  as  again  in  chap.  xxi.  he  sees  the  city  which  is  equal 
in  length,  breadth  and  height,  or  that  in  chap.  v.  he  should 
have  perceived  at  once  that  the  book  sealed  with  seven  seals 
was  written  '  within  and  on  the  back  ' — that  is,  on  both  sides 
of  the  leaves.  That  in  i.  16  the  Son  of  Man  is  described  as 
holding  seven  stars  in  his  right  hand  is  apparently  forgotten 
in  the  next  verse,  for  there  he  lays  this  right  hand  kindly 
upon  the  seer,  who  had  fallen  down  '  as  one  dead.'  Images 
like  that  of  the  Son  of  Man,  out  of  whose  mouth  proceeded  a 
sharp  two-edged  sword,4  or  that  of  the  lamb  with  ten  horns 
and  seven  eyes,  standing  '  as  though  it  had  been  slain,' 5  can 
scarcely  be  the  products  of  a  genuine  vision,  but  were  rather 
put  together  and  written  down  without  any  aid  from  sight. 
And  are  the  '  seven  spirits  of  God,'  which  appear  in  v.  6  as 
the  seven  eyes  of  the  Lamb,  to  be  counted  twice  over,  seeing 
that  we  had  already  recognised  them  in  iv.  5  (and  cf.  i.  4)  in 
the  '  seven  lamps  of  fire  burning  before  the  throne  '  ?  Ex- 
planatory glosses  like  those  just  mentioned,  or  like  verse  v.  8, 
*  bowls  full  of  incense,  which  are  the  prayers  of  the  saints,' 6 
are  ill  suited  to  the  tone  of  a  visionary ;  they  show  the  hand 
of  the  man  of  letters  who  tries  by  incidental  hints  to  make 
his  technical  terms  more  intelligible. 

The  whole  construction  of  the  book,  in  short,  is,  in  spite 
of  numerous  inconsistencies,  far  too  elaborate,  with  its  suc- 
cessive heptades  of  seals,  trumpets  and  bowls,  the  corresponding 
three  and  a  half  years  and  three  and  a  half  days  of  chap,  xi.,  and 

1  iv.  9  fol.,  ix.  6.    Note,  e.g.,  the  change  in  tense  between  xi.  2-10  and  the 
three  following  verses. 

2  i.  15.  3  iv.  8.  '  i.  16.  5  v.  6.  •     f.  xi.  8. 


lad 


268      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [ROOK  n. 

the  general  partiality  for  numbers  and  mathematical  figuri 
of   all   sorts— all   of   which  are  taken  from  the  pre-existinj 
Apocalyptic  material : — God's  ways  are  not  fashioned  accord- 
ing to   the  rules  of  a  cheap  mysticism  of  numbers,  and 
the  visions  even  of  a  sick  man  such  arts  of  calculation 
not  occur.     We  do  not  thereby  deny  that  the  author  had  ha( 
visions,  or  that  they  had  made  a  powerful  impression  upon 
him  and  had  appeared  as  a  divine  injunction  laid  upon  him 
to  impart  his  own  consolation  and  his  own  knowledge  to  the 
rest  of  the  brethren  all  over  the  world.     The  man  who  wrote 
the  Apocalypse  believed  in  his  own  words  with  absolute  trust ; 
but  behind  his  visions  lie  Apocalyptic  studies  which  had  excited 
and  enriched  his  mind  and  his  imagination,  and  after  th( 
visions   lie   still   more   of   them.     The   Apocalypse  is  not 
pamphlet  hurriedly  committed  to  paper  in  the  glowing  excii 
ment  of  a  night,  but  a  learned  work,  over  the  composition 
which  the  writer  often  pondered  long,  and  to  which  he  certainb 
added  many  finishing  touches  after  it  was  completed.     Tl 
framework,  consisting  of  the  superscription  and  the  farewel 
greeting,  were  probably  added  when  all  the  rest  was  finished. 

3.  We  should,  however,  do  the  writer  grave  injustice  if 
assumed  that  his  motive  for  the  elaboration  of  his  work 
a  desire  to  win  the  name  of  Prophet  by  an  Apocalyptic  woi 
of  art,  as  though  he  were  incapable  of  deserving  it  in  tl 
usual  way.  His  seven  Epistles  to  the  Churches l  show 
carefully  he  had  studied  the  condition  of  those  commu- 
nities which  were  accessible  to  him,  how  accurate  was  his 
knowledge  of  their  merits  and  their  shortcomings,  and  how 
earnestly  he  set  about  the  task  of  improving  them.  H< 
knows  the  temptations  to  which  the  patience  of  some  w* 
exposed  by  their  perpetual  sufferings  for  Christ's  sake,  am 
fears  that  they  may  even  yet  lose  hope  ;  and  he  has  misgivings 
lest  others  should  be  found  unprepared  on  the  day  of  the  Lord's 
return.  He  himself  is  convinced  that  the  Parusia  will 
take  place  in  the  near  future  and  that  there  is  short  space 
left  for  repentance  ;  hence  he  seizes  his  pen  to  announce 
in  the  name  of  Christ  the  approaching  day  of  decision, — 
bringing  with  it  eternal  bliss  or  eternal  torment — hopii 

1  Ch.  ii.  fol. 


ml 


§  1>L>.]  TIJK    KKVKLATION    OF    JOHN  269 

thereby  to  kindle  new  life  among  the  followers  of  Christ.  By 
means  of  the  rich  apocalyptic  setting  in  which  he  clothes  his 
fundamental  idea,  and  by  the  use  of  which  he  proves  himself 
be  a  true  child  of  his  age,  ;i  sharer  alike  in  its  taste  and  in  its 
lack  of  the  critical  instinct,  his  book  did  succeed  in  attracting 
attention,  in  producing  an  overwhelming  effect,  and  in  exerting 
a  strong  influence  upon  the  Church.  He  did  not  in  any  way 
aspire  to  interpret  theological  problems,  or  to  start  a  new 
Christology,  or  a  new  doctrine  of  salvation  ;  only  occasionally 
are  we  able  to  perceive  how  he  thought  about  these  questions, 
and  then  not  very  clearly ;  while  the  only  new  matter  that  he 
has  to  communicate  concerns  the  course  of  the  next  and 
latest  period  of  history. 

What  strikes  us  perhaps  most  of  all,  when  we  remember 
the  stress  laid  upon  the  loyalty  of  Christians  to  the  powers 
that  be,  in  Romans  and  1.  Peter,  and  the  recognition  of  their 
'  restraining '  power  in  2.  Thessalonians,1  is  the  burning 
hatred  which  the  Apocalypse  displays  towards  the  empire  of 
Rome.  It  regards  this  empire  as  the  direct  work  of  Satan, 
and  the  city  of  Rome  as  the  pinnacle  of  godlessness  on  earth, 
and  the  writer  cannot  dwell  long  enough  upon  the  descrip- 
tion of  the  judgment  of  Rome  and  the  rejoicing  of  the  saints 
over  her  fall.5  Rome  is  in  his  eyes  the  earthly  Antichrist, 
and  the  Caesar-worship  that  had  been  introduced  there  the 
summit  of  all  blasphemy,3  while  the  head  that  was  mortally 
wounded,  but  recovered  from  the  death-stroke,  is  to  him 
a  caricature  of  Christ :  cp.  the  ws  sa^ay^sv^v  of  xiii.  3  with 
the  same  words  as  applied  to  the  Lamb  in  v.  6.  Till  Rome 
was  destroyed  the  reign  of  the  Messiah  on  earth  could  not  be 
established :  its  fall,  however,  was  soon  to  be  accomplished, 
though  not  before  God  had  endeavoured  by  repeated  revela- 
tions of  his  supernatural  power  to  warn  the  world  of  its  ap- 
proaching fate,  and "  both  by  words  4  and  deeds  to  urge  man- 
kind to  repentance.  He  prepares  them  for  the  approaching 
annihilation  by  plagues  —in  this  case  three  times  seven — so 
that  no  one  can  plead  the  excuse  of  having  fallen  upon  his 
fate  unwarned. 

1  Ch.  ii.         •  Chaps,  xviii.  and  xix.        ••»  xiii.  1,  5  fol.,  8,  12-17.         *  Ch.  xi. 


270       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THK    NEW    TESTAMENT      !~*OOK  n. 

For  it  is  unquestionable  that  the  writer  wished,  between 
chaps  iv.  and  xvii.,  to  trace  the  course  of  the  immediate 
future,  of  the  '  last  things,'  in  chronological  sequence,  and 
along  an  uninterrupted,  even  line  ;  the  order  of  his  narratio 
(in  other  words,  of  his  vision)  is  always  also  the  order  of  fulfil- 
ment. This  is,  however,  disputed  by  the  supporters  of  the 
'  recapitulative '  interpretation — from  Victorinus  down  to 
B.  Weiss — who  assert  that  the  same  periods  and  events  are 
repeated  throughout  the  Apocalypse,  only  in  different  garb,  so 
that  large  sections  of  the  book  are  to  be  understood  as  juxta- 
posed rather  than  consecutive. 

Certainly  it  is  undeniable  that  the  advance  from  earlier  to 
later  events  is  often  imperfect :  the  breaking  of  the  sixth  seal, 
for  instance,  in  chap,  vi.,  is  followed  by  almost  more  ap- 
palling consequences  than  is  the  sounding  of  the  first  trumpet 
in  chap,  viii.,  or  the  pouring  forth  of  the  first  bowl  in  chap,  xvi., 
while  the  crisis  in  vi.  17 — '  for  the  great  day  of  their  wrath 
is  come ' — seems  to  be  identical  with  that  which  follows  the 
sounding  of  the  sixth  trumpet  in  x.  7,  or  that  of  xiv.  7  ;  and 
xiv.  8  is  also  identical  with  xviii.  2.  But  from  such  occasion 
faults  of  composition  we  must  not  draw  any  too  hasty  con- 
clusions. The  writer's  skill  had  its  limits,  and  his  imagina- 
tive material  was  sometimes  too  much  for  him.  It  would, 
however,  be  truly  wonderful  if  this  were  not  the  case,  for  if 
the  Apocalypse  satisfied  even  the  lowest  claims  of  dramat- 
urgic aesthetics,  it  would  stand  alone  among  numerous 
examples  of  its  class.  Moreover,  nothing  is  really  parallel  in 
the  various  parallel  acts  which  have  been  constructed  out  of 
it  but  the  number  of  scenes  and  the  effect  (or  ineffectiveness) 
of  the  plagues :  when,  for  instance,  at  the  second  trumpet- 
blast  l  a  third  part  of  the  sea  is  turned  to  blood  and  a  third 
part  of  the  creatures  in  and  upon  the  sea  are  destroyed,  while 
at  the  pouring  out  of  the  second  bowl 2  the  sea  becomes  blood 
and  every  living  creature  that  was  in  it  dies,  the  intention  of 
gradation  is  surely  unmistakable.  Altogether,  we  should  be 
obliged  to  credit  the  writer  with  a  strange  in  difference  towards 
the  subject-matter  of  his  visions,  and  to  exaggerate  the  idea  of 
their  '  figurativeness  '  beyond  all  measure,  if  we  assume  that 

1  viii.  8.  -  x  • 


! 


§  £>.]  THE    REVELATION    OF    JOHN  271 

he  is  capable  of  describing  identical  events  from  the  Last  Days 
under  different  forms.  Apart  from  the  fact  that  he  nowhere 
gives  us  any  sign  of  an  interruption  in  his  ecstasy,  and  that 
the  unprejudiced  reader  is  compelled  to  recognise  an  unbroken 
succession  of  miraculous  events,  this  hypothesis  which  is 
excusable  in  Victorinus  (about  800) — implies  a  complete  mis- 
conception of  the  very  nature  of  Apocalyptics.  The  apo- 
calyptic writer  would  be  incapable — in  spite  of  his  delight  in 
mystery— of  representing  the  same  event  under  different 
images,  simply  because  in  his  eyes  it  was  not  a  question  of 
images,  but  of  realities ;  he  might  indeed  put  on  the  same 
level  such  things  as  seals,  trumpets  and  bowls,  though  I 
prefer  to  think  that  there  is  a  perfectly  well-considered  grada- 
tion even  in  these  instruments,  but  he  could  not  treat  in  the 
same  way  a  victorious  Parthian  campaign,  the  burning  of  a 
third  part  of  the  earth  and  its  trees,  and  the  '  noisome  and 
grievous  sore '  upon  mankind. 

The  Apocalypse  is,  in  fact,  not  a  poem  or  an  allegory ; 
rather  the  figurative  matter  in  it  is  intended  to  be  taken  very 
seriously.  At  any  rate  the  writer  was  not  conscious  of  the 
boundary  line  between  the  metaphorical  and  the  actual, 
for  the  innumerable  similes  which  he  employs  for  purposes  of 
illustration — e.g.  ix.  5,  '  And  their  torment  was  as  the  tor- 
ment of  a  scorpion,  when  it  striketh  a  man  '—surely  do  not 
sound  as  though  he  were  using  the  language  of  unreality. 
The  key  of  the  pit  of  the  abyss  is  no  more  '  merely  figurative  ' 
than  the  lake  of  fire  and  brimstone,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  in 
xxi.  8  this  last  is  interpreted  as  the  '  second  death  ; '  while  in 
accordance  with  the  spirit  of  the  book,  the  seven  lamps  of  fire 
burning  before  the  throne  of  God  do  not  cease  to  burn  merely 
because  the  writer  recognises  in  them  the  seven  Spirits  of  God. 
Nor  would  the  seventh  seal  and  the  seventh  trumpet  have  any 
content  left  unless  we  looked  upon  the  succeeding  heptade  as 
the  unfolding  of  this  content ;  while  the  conformity  of  vi.  17 
with  x.  7  and  xiv.  7  is  best  explained  by  supposing  that 
although  after  the  breaking  of  six  seals,  the  end  of  the  world 
seemed  to  be  at  hand,  God's  mercy  tries  new  and  sharper 
warnings,  once  and  again,  which  the  much -afflicted  and 
already  half-despairing  saints  must  bear  in  patience.  It 


272      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [BOOK  II. 

was  not  merely  love  of  romancing  that  induced  the  writer 
to  give  us  so  many  different  scenes  from  the  transition  period, 
before  the  longed-for  catastrophe — (and  still  less  may  we,  con- 
trary to  his  intention,  reduce  their  number  by  about  a  third 
through  a  process  of  compression) — but  because  he  believed, 
saw,  that  is,  knew  for  certain  that  the  Kingdom  of  the  Lamb 
on  earth  would  not  be  established  so  suddenly  as  many 
wished  it  to  be :  that  it  had  yet  to  be  preceded  by  a  soul- 
stirring  tragedy  of  several  acts  and  many  scenes.  The 
reproach  that  hope  had  been  deceived,  prophecies  left  un- 
fulfilled, that  the  End  had  been  often  announced  and  had 
never  appeared,  could  only  be  met — unless  the  '  last  things  ' 
were  to  be  postponed  to  an  infinitely  distant  future,  and  the 
recent  proclamation  of  them  were  to  be  disavowed — by  con- 
structing a  scheme  for  these  '  last  things  '  of  ample  propor- 
tions, in  which  at  various  points  catastrophe  enters,  but,  as 
the  reader  learns,  is  an  end,  but  not  yet  the  end. 

4.  The  Apocalypse  undoubtedly  springs  from  Jewish  - 
Christian  circles.  The  writer  is  not  only  so  familiar  with  the 
Old  Testament  and  moreover  with  every  part  of  it  in  equal 
degree  —that  his  points  of  contact  with  it  are  almost  inces- 
sant, but  he  lives  in  the  very  midst  of  all  that  apparatus  of 
Apocalyptic  ideas  heaped  together  from  later  Judaism,  from 
the  Old  Testament,  but  also  from  other  sources,  such  as 
Babylono-Persian  mythology  and  Greek  poetry,  and  sometimes 
even  prides  himself  upon  interpreting  it  correctly  for  the  first 
time.1  He  speaks  of  the  '  Gentiles  '  in  the  tone  of  the  born 
Jew,'2  and  the  fanatical  colouring  of  his  wrath  against  Borne, 
the  new  Babylon,  is  also  specifically  Jewish.  He  hails  the 
Messiah  as  the  '  Lion  of  the  tribe  of  Judah,'  the  '  Boot  of 
David,' 3  and  with  all  his  hatred  against  his  unbelieving 
countrymen,  the  name  '  Jew '  remains  in  his  eyes  a  title  of 
honour.  But  he  is  still  more  fully  betrayed  by  his  language. 
He  understands  Hebrew  (see,  for  instance,  his  translation  of 
Balaam  into  Nicolaus  in  ii.  14  fol.),4  is  familiar  with  the  Old 

1  E.g.,  Zach.  iv.  in  xi.  4  ;  Ezek.  xxxviii.  fol.  in  xx.  8  ;  the  myths  of  the 
with  the  dragon  and  of  the  seven-headed  beast  in  Chaps,  xii.,  \iii.  and  xvii. 

2  xi.  2,  xx.  3  and  8.  3  v.  5. 
iii.  14,  « the  Amen,'  ix.  11,  xvi.  16. 


§  22.]  T1IK    REVELATION    OF    JOHN  273 

Testament  in  the  original  tongue  or  else  in  an  Aramaic  ver- 
sion, and  his  book  is  written  throughout  in  the  Jewish-Greek, 
a  language  which  is  not  wanting  in  clearness,  nor  occasion- 
ally in  a  certain  rhythm  and  force,  but  which  in  its  barbarous 
violations  of  the  rules  of  Greek  grammar  and  syntax  would 
only  be  explicable  as  coming  from  a  man  who  did  not  use  it 
as  his  mother  tongue  —  whose  thoughts  ran  in  a  Semitic 
groove.  Certain  portions,  such  as  chap,  xii.,  give  us  the 
impression  of  being  translated  almost  literally  from  the 
Hebrew,  and  as  no  one  would  probably  care  nowadays  to  assert 
as  much  of  the  whole  Apocalypse  —  of  passages  like  i.  9-11, 
for  instance,  or  of  the  seven  Epistles  —  the  fact  that  no 
difference  of  style  is  perceptible  at  any  point  is  all  the  more 
remarkable.  The  text  has  certainly  come  down  to  us  very 
much  corrupted,  but  most  of  the  variants  owe  their  origin  to 
the  desire  of  later  copyists  to  make  the  book  more  readable 
for  the  cultivated  Greek.  The  Apocalypse  will  co-ordinate  a 
participle  and  a  finite  verb  by  means  of  the  definite  article  — 
e.g.  ii.  20,  l  /;  \:<yovcra  avrrjv  7rpo<f>r)Tiv  ical  Si^da/cei,  .  .  .,  and 
still  more  strongly  in  i.  4  and  8  :  o  wv  KOI  6  TIV  KOI  6  kpxo/jisvos, 
a  title  which  is  treated  as  indeclinable,  e.g.  UTTO  6  wv  etc. 
Appositions  in  the  nominative  are  made  to  every  oblique 
case,2  and  according  to  Hebrew  custom  the  oblique  forms 
of  avros  are  added  pleonastically  to  participles  and  relatives.-'5 
Phrases  like  Troirjcra)  avrovs  Iva  ri^ovcriv^  the  confusion  of 
moods  and  tenses,5  or  of  genders/'  the  use,  or  rather  misuse, 
of  prepositions,7  the  total  absence  of  the  instrumental  dative, 
the  place  of  which  is  supplied  by  e^,8  and  a  construction  which 
makes  no  attempt  at  the  Greek  form  of  period,  and  which 
can  hardly  accomplish  dependent  clauses  except  when  intro- 


and 


Also  i.  5  and  ii.  9.         2  E.g.,  i.  5,  ii.  13  and  20,  iii.  12,  ix.  14,  xx.  2. 

E.g.,  ii.  7,  TOJ  ytKwvTi   Suxrw  avr(f},  and  iii.  8,  *f)v  ovSels  Si/varai  K\f?(rai  ai>Tr,v, 
cf.  xii.  6, 


iii.  9. 

E.g.,  iii.  9  :  "va  irpoffKvvr)ffovffu/  Kal  yvuxrtv. 

Eg.,  iv.  l,r?  <j)wv$]   .   .   .  \4yu:v,  iv.  8,  ^0)0  fv  /cofl'  ev  ainfay  e^cui/. 

E.g.,  <hn  with  KaQrjcrdai,  used  with  all  cases  indiscriminately ;  and  tK  or 
with  the  Passive  instead  of  vv6. 
8  E.g.,  xiii.  8,  Iv  fjiaxaiprj  diroKTfivfiv. 

T 


274          AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT  [BOOK  n. 

duced  by  o?  or  on  : — these  are  all  signs  of  a  Semitic  habit  of 
writing. 

But  the  question  remains  as  to  whether  the  Jewish 
Christianity  of  the  Apocalypse  has  also  a  dogmatic  signifi- 
cance, i.e.  should  be  taken  as  anti-Pauline,  as  Judaistic.  The 
Tiibingen  school,  especially  G.  Volkmar,  assert  that  Paul  is 
attacked  in  the  Apocalypse  with  burning  hatred  ;  that  it  is  he 
to  whom  the  '  first  apostles '  of  ii.  3  refer,  for  whose  rejection 
the  Ephesians  are  so  highly  commended,  and  that  the  writer's 
mention  in  ii.  24  of  those '  which  know  not  the  deep  things  of 
Satan  '  is  no  less  than  an  ironical  citation  of  1.  Cor.  ii.  10, 
turned  against  the  followers  of  Paul.  Well,  the  fact  that  the 
foundation-stones  of  the  New  Jerusalem  are  described  in  xxi. 
14  as  bearing  the  names  of  the  twelve  Apostles  of  the  Lamb  is 
certainly  a  proof  that  the  writer  did  not  take  much  notice  of 
Paul,  who  according  to  1.  Cor.1  did  not  belong  to  the  Twelve ; 
but  to  ignore  him  in  such  a  case,  to  place  him  below  the 
Twelve  Apostles,  is  not  by  any  means  the  same  thing  as  to 
brand  him  as  Antichrist.  The  Apocalypse  itself  is  entirely 
devoid  of  anti- Pauline  polemics,  and  we  are  only  justi- 
fied in  describing  its  Christianity  as  one  not  distinctly  or 
consciously  dependent  on  or  influenced  by  Paul.  The  writer 
was  no  child,  no  disciple,  of  Paul,  but  still  less  a  Judaist  fana- 
tically devoted  to  the  Law.  The  preference  given  to  Pales- 
tine, Jerusalem  and  the  twelve  tribes  of  Israel  in  his  future 
Kingdom  bears  the  proper  Judaistic  stamp  so  little  that  one 
might  even  credit  the  writer  of  Eomans  ix.-xi.  with  the  same 
hopes.  That  Jewish  Chauvinism  which  considered  none  but 
the  seed  of  Abraham  worthy  of  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  and 
of  eternal  blessedness  is  entirely  foreign  to  the  Apocalypse : 
it  declares  unequivocally  that  salvation  was  intended  for  all 
men  ;  God's  earthly  communities  are  represented  before  His 
throne  by  24  and  not  merely  12  Elders,  and  according  to 
v.  9  the  Lamb  had  purchased  with  his  blood  '  men  of  every 
tribe,  and  tongue,  and  people,  and  nation,'  with  which  the  pic- 
ture of  vii.  9  fol.2  entirely  agrees.  And  as,  on  the  one  hand, 
all  nations  are  represented  among  the  martyrs  for  the  name  of 
Christ — for  the  important  point  was  not  to  be  a  Jew,  but  to 

1  xv.  5.  *  Cf.  xxi.  24  fol.,  xxii.  2. 


i 


§  22.]  THE    REVELATION    OF   JOHN  275 

have  been  inscribed  in  the  Book  of  Life  from  the  foundation 
of  the  world  ' — so  on  the  other  hand  the  Apocalypse  expects 
nothing  for  the  bearer  of  the  name  of  Jew  as  such,  and  calls 
the  unbelieving  Jews  in  ii.  9  merely  a  (or  the)  '  synagogue  of 
Sat  an.' 

But  the  freedom  from  legal  bondage  to  which  the  Apo- 
calypse bears  witness  is  just  as  undeniable  as  its  universalism  ; 
except  for  the  prohibition  to  eat  meat  sacrificed  to  idols  and 
to  commit  fornication,2 — which  must  remind  every  reader  of 
the  Apostolic  Decree  of  Acts  xv.  28  fol. — the  writer  is  un- 
willing to  '  cast  any  other  burden ' :1  upon  his  readers.  In 
the  Kingdom  of  the  New  Jerusalem  there  is  no  temple, !  and 
the  word  circumcision  is  not  once  mentioned  throughout 
the  book.  That  form  of  Antinomianism  which  chaps,  ii.  and 
iii.  contend  against,  the  writer  of  1.  Cor.  would  also  have 
contended  against  to  the  death.  It  is  true  that  the  Apostle 
who  wrote  Philippians  iii.  4-11  could  never  have  expressed 
the  undoubted  right  of  a  'remnant'  of  Israel  to  salvation 
in  so  mechanical  a  way  as  chap.  vii.  here  expresses  it — 
Galatians  iii.  28  ('  there  can  be  neither  Jew  nor  Greek  ')  is 
certainly  a  more  lofty  point  of  view  than  Kev.  ii.  9  or  iii.  9. 
The  peculiarities  of  the  Pauline  theology  are,  moreover,  en- 
tirely lacking ;  by  '  faith '  the  Apocalypse  understands  a 
steadfast,  patient  endurance,  and  it  looks  upon  a  man's 
works  rj — of  which  faith  was  certainly  the  loftiest — as  the  point 
on  which  his  salvation  depended.  The  relation  between  this 
Jewish  idea  and  that  of  predestination  remains  uncertain  ;  the 
writer  would  probably  have  thought  of  them  as  harmonised 
by  the  prescience  of  God. 

The  chief  characteristic  of  the  figure  of  Christ  in  the 
Apocalypse  is  that  the  Saviour  is  for  the  most  part  represented 
in  the  form  of  a  Lamb  (apvlov),  which  had  shed  its  blood 
and  been  slain,  but  had  then,  as  the  '  firstborn  of  the  dead,' 6 
entered  upon  the  period  of  universal  sway.  Christ's  death, 
his  present  and  especially  his  future  glory,  are  religious  facts 
of  fundamental  importance  to  the  Apocalypse.  But  we  learn 

iii.  5,  xiii.  8,  xvii.  8,  xx.  12  and  15,  xxi.  27. 
2  ii.  14  and  20.  s  ii.  24.  J  xxi.  22. 

5  From  ii.  2  to  xxii.  12.  6  i.  5. 

T  2 


276          AN    INTRODUCTION"   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT  [BOOK  n. 

nothing  very  definite  concerning  the  necessity  for  and  the 
significance  of  his  death,  and  nothing  whatever  about  his 
life  on  earth.  Once,  in  a  context  that  reminds  us  of  Matt, 
xi.  27,  the  writer  applies  the  name  '  Word  of  God '  l  to  the 
crucified  Heavenly  King ;  in  two  passages  it  is  uncertain 
whether  the  divine  titles  refer  to  the  Father  or  to  the  Son  ; 
but  the  distinction  between  the  two  is  at  any  rate  to  be  strictly 
maintained,  for  in  the  very  first  verse  the  '  Revelation  of 
Jesus  Christ '  is  given  to  Christ  by  God,  while  in  iii.  14 
he  is  spoken  of  as  part  of  the  '  creation  of  God,'  even  though 
as  its  beginning  (ap%>;).  In  ethical  matters  especially,  the 
author  of  the  Apocalypse  has  no  more  connection  with  Paul 
than  every  Christian  of  that  time  must  have  had  ;  the  idea  of 
reward  plays  a  great  part  in  his  mind,  and  he  gives  a  parti- 
cularly high  value  to  the  negative  virtues  ;  next  to  the  martyrs, 
the  ascetics  form  the  highest  class  of  believers,  for  we  are  told 
in  xiv.  4  that  '  they  which  follow  the  Lamb  whithersoever  he 
goeth,'  his  *  firstfruits,'  were  virgins  :  that  is, '  an  hundred  and 
forty  and  four  thousand  that  had  been  purchased  out  of  the 
earth  and  were  not  defiled  with  women.'  And  it  is  highly 
probable  that  a  distinction  corresponding  to  this  attitude  of 
mind  is  intended  between  the  saints  and  those  that  feared 
the  name  of  God,  mentioned  in  xi.  18.  Thus,  then,  in  spite 
of  many  points  of  contact  with  the  Pauline  phraseology 2— 
which  hardly  suffice  to  establish  the  idea  that  the  writer 
had  made  a  study  of  the  Pauline  literature — the  Christianity 
of  the  Apocalypse  can  be  called  neither  Pauline  nor  anti- 
Pauline  ;  so  far  as  any  religious  views  or  conceptions  can  be 
discovered  in  it  outside  the  circle  of  eschatological  ideas,  they 
can  be  explained  as  the  natural  development — possibly  in- 
fluenced indirectly  by  the  results  of  the  Pauline  mission  to 
the  Gentiles — of  the  primitive  form  in  which  the  Gospel 
converted  Jews  into  believers ;  the  writer  would  have  felt 
himself  quite  at  home,  for  instance,  in  the  Roman  community 
of  about  the  year  58.:! 

5.  From  the  time  of  Justin  '  onwards  the  Apocalypse  was 
attested  by  the  Church  as  the  work  of  the  Apostle  John,  i.e. 

1  xh.  13.  2  1  Cor.  xv.  20;  Col.  i.  If,  ;ind  IS  ;  2  Cor.  v.  17 

*  See  §  8,  par.  5.  4  About  150 


§  22.]  T11K    KKVKLAT10N    Ob1    JOHN  277 

John  the  son  of  Zebedee,  and  fifty  years  later  it  was  known 
that  the  Apostle  John  had  seen  these  visions  when  exiled,  for 
the  Gospel's  sake,  to  the  island  of  i'atinos.  But  also  about 
the  year  200  A.D.  a  distinguished  theologian,  Cains,  disputed 
the  Apostolic  origin  of  the  Apocalypse,  declaring  it  rather  to 
be  a  worthless  forgery  by  the  heretic  Cerinthus  ;  and  he  found 
supporters  in  this  view  among  the  Christians  of  the  East,  even 
though  only  among  certain  learned  individuals.  The '  Alogi '  of 
Asia  Minor  maintained  a  similar  view,  and  in  the  school  of  Alex- 
andria we  find  that  from  about  the  year  260  onwards  the  writer 
was  held  to  be,  not  the  Apostle  John,  but  another  celebrated 
John  of  Ephesus.  If  we  add  to  this  that  the  Emperor  who 
banished  him  is  generally  mentioned  as  Domitian,  but  some- 
times also  as  Claudius,  Nero  or  Trajan,  while  some  writers 
avoid  giving  any  name  at  all,  and  that  the  place  from  which 
he  was  banished  is  Home,  according  to  some,  and  Ephesus, 
according  to  others,  it  will  be  seen  that  it  is  not  possible 
to  plead  a  uniform  and  trustworthy  tradition.  Even  though 
the  arguments  of  Caius  against  the  Apostolic  origin  of 
the  Apocalypse,  prompted  as  they  are  by  dogmatic  motives, 
need  impress  us  little,  the  equally  prejudiced  arguments  of 
Churchmen  on  the  other  side  must  also  be  disregarded ;  the 
'  tradition  '  had  in  fact  derived,  or  rather  deduced,  all  its  own 
knowledge  about  the  book  from  the  book  itself,  combining  it 
with  a  little  outside  '  knowledge '  as  well ;  so  that  we  must  set 
aside  all  this  pseudo-evidence  and  go  to  the  only  fountain-head, 
the  book  itself,  for  its  own  testimony. 

The  writer  speaks  of  himself  as  John,1  as  Christ's  servant,'2 
and  as  a  '  brother  and  partaker '  with  his  readers  '  in  the  tribu- 
lation and  kingdom,' 3  and  according  to  i.  4  these  readers  were 
the  seven  communities  of  the  province  of  Asia.  Hence  we 
must  assume  that  he  was  an  Asiatic  Christian,  which  was 
already  probable  from  the  fact  that  he  took  a  particular 
interest  in  the  seven  churches  of  Asia, '  and  had  an  accurate 
knowledge  of  their  circumstances.  That  he  had  only  migrated 
thither  from  Palestine  as  an  old  man  may  possibly  be  gathered 
from  his  style,  but  the  hypothesis  is  not  necessary,  for  the 
language  in  which  he  writes  and  the  attachment  which  he 

1  i.  1,  4,  9,  xxii.  2.  -  i.  1.  3  i.  9.  4  i.  4. 


278          AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT  [BOOK  n. 

shows  to  the  Holy  Land  would  be  very  natural  even  in  a  Jew 
of  the  Dispersion,  who  had  had  a  strictly  Jewish  education 
and  training.     The  name  John  was  a  common  one  among 
Jews  :    we  hear  of  a  Christian  of  the  name,  John  Mark,  in 
the  New  Testament '  as  well  as  of  the  son  of  Zebedee ;  we 
know  from  other  sources  that  in  the  Ephesian  community  at 
least  the  Jewish  Christian  element  was  strongly  represented, 
and  what   right  have  we  to  assume  that  the  writer   of   the 
Apocalypse  was    necessarily   the   most   famous   man   of   his 
name  ?     Or  will  anyone  seriously  assert  the  Apostle's  author- 
ship on  the  ground  that  he  was  surnamed  by  Jesus,  according 
to  Mark  iii.  17,  '  Son  of  thunder,'  and  that  this  name  seems 
especially  to  fit  the  Apocalyptic  writer  ? — as  though  a  tem- 
perament of  that  sort  were  of  such  rare  occurrence  in  those 
times  !     If  the  '  Lord's  day '  of  verse  i.  10  is  part   of   the 
figurative  setting,  the  same  may  be  said  of  the  alleged  scene 
of  the  visions,   the  island  of   Patmos  2 ;    and  moreover  the 
writer  says  nothing  of  any  banishment,  while  the  '  word  of 
God  and  the  testimony  of  Jesus '  for  which  he  went  to  Patmos 
might  easily  refer  to  the  contents  of  the  book  itself,3  to  receive 
which  he  had  betaken  himself  to  the  lonely  island.     It  might 
seem  natural  then,  if  so  many  of  the  writer's  statements  con- 
cerning his  experiences — his  ecstasy,  his  seeing  and  hearing, 
Mild  his  conversations  with  the  angel — are  to  be  regarded  as 
apocalyptic  form,  to  make  no  distinctions,  and  to  look  upon  the 
name  of  the  writer  too  as  imaginary.     In  that  case  a  great 
man  must  have  been  meant,  the  only  man,  in  fact,  of  whom 
an  Asiatic  Christian  could  have  thought  in  reading  the  bare 
name  '  John '  ;    and,  supposing  the  Apostle  John  had  ever 
been  known  in  Asia  Minor,  then  this  Apostle  may  well  be 
understood.     But  the  book  is  equally  devoid  of  indications 
either   that   the  writer  wished  to   be  taken  for,  or  that  he 
actually  was,  the  Apostle.    Not  a  syllable  points  to  the  Apostle- 
ship  of  this  John  ;  even  when  Jesus  speaks  to  him  there  is 
no  mention  of  their  former  intercourse,  and  in  xxi.  14  the 
writer  speaks  of  the  '  twelve  Apostles  of  the  Lamb'  certainly 
not  in  the  tone  of  one  who  belonged  to  their  number  or  could 
possibly  belong  to  it.     Nor  may  we  bring  forward  the  argu- 

1  Acts  xii.  12  etc.  -  i.  9. 


§  22.]  TIM]    KKYKLATION    OF    JOHN  279 

ment  that  he  addresses  his  readers  in  the  tone  of  one  con- 
scious of  possessing  the  highest  authority.  However  high  an 
opinion  he  has  of  his  book,1  it  is  not  because  of  his  own  high 
position  in  the  Church,  but  because  his  prophecy  is  genuine, 
his  words  'faithful  and  true.'  He  demands  his  hearing  as  a 
Prophet  -  who  had  been  found  worthy  to  receive  the  revela- 
tions of  Jesus  Christ  through  his  angel,  and  he  does  not  set 
up  any  other  claim  :  it  is  not  he,  for  instance,  but  the  Son  of 
Man,  who  criticises  the  seven  churches.  Now  the  Prophet 
regards  himself  as  only  the  accidental  vessel  in  which  a 
heavenly  wisdom  is  offered  to  the  faithful ;  the  withdrawal  of 
the  person  and  of  everything  personal  into  the  background, 
which  in  a  real  letter  is  impossible,  is  here  demanded  by 
the  exigencies  of  the  literary  genre,  and  we  cannot,  there- 
fore, be  careful  enough  in  drawing  our  conclusions,  especially 
those  e  silentio.  But  so  long  as  it  is  not  proved  that  every 
Apocalypse  must  of  necessity  be  pseudonymous, — and  such 
an  assertion  is  preliminarily  refuted  by  the  '  Shepherd '  of 
Hennas, — we  have  no  right  to  make  the  arbitrary  assumption 
that  our  Apocalypse  was  written  under  a  false  name.  It  alone, 
without  the  existence  of  the  tradition,  would  never  suggest  the 
idea  that  its  writer  was  one  of  the  Twelve  Apostles,  or  a  patri- 
archal Head-Pastor  of  Asia,  or  in  fact  more  than  a  Prophet,  who, 
at  the  time  when  his  book  was  first  circulated,  had  already  been 
working  long  and  fruitfully  among  the  Asiatic  communities. 

6.  The  writer  of  the  Apocalypse,  in  fact,  does  not  become 
mysterious  until  we  begin  to  examine  the  curious  rela- 
tion borne  by  his  book  to  the  rest  of  the  '  Johannine ' 
writings — a  relation  which  presents  the  most  marked  diver- 
gencies on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other  certain  indisputable 
signs  of  connection.  The  divergencies  are  now  almost  uni- 
versally recognised,  in  spite  of  the  tradition,  which  would  not 
hear  of  any  but  Apostolic  writers  within  the  limits  of  the  New 
Testament.  The  writer  of  the  Apocalypse  wrote  neither  the 
Gospel  nor  either  of  the  Epistles,  nor  is  his  indebtedness  to 
them  discoverable  in  any  part  of  the  Apocalypse.  As  it 
was  generally  felt  even  by  the  instinct  of  those  early  times, 
seer  and  evangelist  differed  from  one  another  absolutely  in 

1  xxii.  18  fol.  -  xxii.  G. 


280          AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT  [BOOK  n. 

vocabulary,  style,  ideas  and  point  of  view.  *  Jerusalem,'  for 
instance,  is  always  spelt  by  the  Gospel  'lepoaitKvpa,  by  the 
Apocalypse  'Ispouo-aTuj//, ;  the  Gospel  is  free  from  the  rude 
Semiticisms  of  the  Apocalypse,  which  on  its  side  reminds  us 
nowhere  of  the  quite  peculiar  style  of  John  ;  the  antitheses 
between  light  and  darkness,  God  and  the  world,  love  and 
hate  do  not  appear  at  all  in  the  Apocalypse,  and  the  latter 
never  speaks  of  '  abiding  in  '  anything,  still  less  of  being 
*  born  of  God,'  '  of  the  Spirit,'  or  of  '  being  of  God.'  The 
Apocalypse  speaks  of  Jesus  as  a  Lamb  innumerable  times, 
but  merely  makes  use  of  the  word  dpviov  for  it  without  any 
addition,  while  the  Gospel  has  6  dpvos  rov  Osov. 

Finally,  the  theological  attitude  of  the  Gospel  is  almost 
diametrically  opposed  to  that  of  the  Apocalypse.  For  the 
latter,  the  Jew  who  is  worthy  of  the  name  is  the  faithful 
Christian,1  whereas  for  the  former  the  word  Jew  is  merely  a 
shameful  epithet  branding  the  nation  which  had  shed  the 
blood  of  Christ ;  the  eschatological  hopes  to  which  the  soul 
of  the  seer  clings  with  passionate  longing  retire  so  far  into 
the  background  in  the  Gospel  that  one  might  almost  doubt 
their  existence,  and  the  visions  of  the  future  with  their  highly 
sensual  colouring  would  hardly  have  been  approved  of  by  the 
Evangelist,  with  his  tendency  towards  spiritualising  all  things. 
Nor  should  we  fail  to  observe  the  fact  that  in  the  Apocalypse 
the  writer  names  himself  without  any  circumlocution,  while  in 
the  other  Johannine  writings  this  is  partially  avoided  in  various 
ways.  The  professional  apologist  of  course  finds  it  possible  to  ex- 
plain away  all  these  difficulties  as  though  they  were  mere  child's 
play :  the  Apostle  John  had  undergone  considerable  develop- 
ment, he  urges,  and  had  taken  less  pains,  besides,  to  write  cor- 
rect Greek  in  the  Apocalypse  than  to  give  a  true  rendering  of 
what  he  saw  (a  melancholy  theory,  as  though  truth  had 
seemed  less  necessary  to  him  in  writing  the  Gospel !) :  but, 
nevertheless,  it  is  one  of  the  most  assured  results  of  New  Testa- 
ment criticism  that  not  another  line  from  the  hand  of  the 
writer  of  the  Apocalypse  has  been  preserved  to  us  in  the  New 
Testament,  least  of  all  in  the  Gospel  of  John  ;  for  if  the 
Apocalypse  is  the  most  Jewish  book  of  the  New  Testament, 

1  ii.  9,  iii.  9. 


v   L>I'.]  Till:    KKYKLATION    OF    .IOIIN  281 

tlie  Fourth  Gospel  is  certainly  the  most  anti-Jewish,  the 
most  opposed  to  the  whole  circle  of  Jewish  interests  and  ideas, 
the  furthest  removed  from  the  Jewish  atmosphere. 

At  the  present  day,  however,  the  need  is  rather  to 
emphasise  the  opposite  fact,  that  of  the  signs  of  relationship 
between  the  Apocalypse,  and  the  Gospel  and  Epistles  of  John. 
Bousset 1  has  collected  a  body  of  material  which  proves  that 
such  a  connection  exists  even  in  minor  peculiarities  of 
language;  favourite  Johannine  phrases  like  ^aprvpia  and 
fiaprvpeiv  are  also  of  frequent  occurrence  in  the  Apocalypse— 
though  with  the  addition  of  the  words  paprvpiov  and  fidprvsj 
which  are  again  unknown  to  the  Gospel ;  and  the  Johannine 
similes  of  the  water  of  life,  the  vine,  the  shepherd,  and  the 
bride,  are  all  to  be  found  in  the  Apocalypse,  though  always 
with  certain  peculiar  differences  of  meaning  or  of  expression  ; 
o^ns  occurs  throughout  the  New  Testament  only  in  the  Fourth 
Gospel  2  and  the  Apocalypse,"  afyd&iv  only  in  the  latter  and 
the  First  Epistle  of  John.4  Christ  is  extolled  as  having 
*  overcome  the  world  '  only  in  the  Gospel 5  and  the  Apocalypse  ; 
the  victory  of  the  Christian  in  like  manner  only  in  the 
Apocalypse  and  the  First  Epistle.  The  words  '  her  children  ' 
and  *  this  teaching '  in  Kev.  ii.  23  and  24  remind  us  of 
2.  John  4  and  10,  while  the  expression  which  occurs  so  fre- 
quently in  the  Apocalypse,0  to  '  keep  the  word '  or  the  '  com- 
mandment' of  Jesus  or  God,  has  numerous  exact  parallels 
only  in  the  Gospel  and  the  First  Epistle.  The  name  '  Word 
of  God '  as  applied  to  Jesus  in  Rev.  xix.  13  7  is  probably  not 
synonymous  with  the  Logos  idea  implied  in  the  Prologue 
to  the  Fourth  Gospel,  but  the  phrase  '  as  I  also  have  received 
of  my  Father '  in  Rev.  ii.  27  is  the  very  language  used  by  the 
Johannine  Christ  in  John  x.  18,  and  it  is  only  in  these  two 
books,  again,  that  the  Saviour  is  spoken  of  as  a  Lamb.  These 
points  of  detail,  however,  are  not  sufficient  to  assist  us  in  deter- 
mining the  author  of  the  Apocalypse,  nor  when  we  weigh 
them  carefully  can  they  be  said  to  favour  the  assumption  that 
either  of  the  parties  concerned  was  under  literary  obligations 

1  Meyer,  vol.  xvi.  pp.  206-8.  2  xi.  44,  vii.  24. 

3  i.  16.  4  iii.  12.  5  xvi.  33. 

6  iii.  8,  10,  xii.  17,  xiv.  12  etc.  7  See  p.  276. 


282          AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT  [BOOK  ir. 

to  the  other  ;  they  are  perhaps  best  explained  on  the  supposi- 
tion that  Gospel,  Epistles  and  Apocalypse  grew  up  on  the 
same  soil,  in  a  church  in  which  a  peculiar  religious  language 
and  world  of  ideas  had  established  themselves  at  the  time, 
but  without  injury  to  freedom  in  other  respects.  But  it  is 
only  in  dealing  with  the  Gospel  that  we  shall  be  able  to  turn 
this  suggestion  to  account ;  here  we  cannot  go  beyond  the 
result  already  attained,  that  according  to  the  self -testimony 
of  the  Apocalypse,  its  author  was  a  teacher  of  Asia  Minor 
named  John. 

7.  Now,  when  did  this  John  produce  his  book?     No  con- 
clusions can  safely  be  drawn  from  the  names  of  the  com- 
munities, for  the  fact  that  the  greater  number  of  them  are  not 
mentioned  elsewhere  in  the  New  Testament  does  not  prove 
that  they  might  not  have  been  founded,  in  the  same  way  as 
Colossse  and  Laodicea,  as  early  as  the  time  of  Paul.     A  rela- 
tively late  assignment  is  rather  favoured  by  the  fact  that  the 
memory  of  Paul  seems  to  have  died  away  in  these  communities  ; 
but  was  it  really  imperative  that  Jesus  should  remind  the 
Ephesians  of  the  man  who  had  won  them  to  his  name,  and 
even,  perhaps,  quote   a    fragment  of  Paul's  Epistle   to   the 
Laodiceans,  in  the  letter  addressed  to  that  community  ?   That  it 
is  impossible  to  prove  any  employment  of  the  Pauline  Epistles 
we  have  already  pointed  out ;  l  but  the  parallels  between  the 
Apocalypse  and  the  eschatological  discourses  in  the  Synoptic 
Gospels   are   more   remarkable,  although   we   cannot   assert 
any  actual  dependence  on  one  side  or  the  other ;  and  beside 
Mark  xiii.  2,  Piev.  xi.  1  fol.  even  makes  the  more  primitive 
impression.     But   one  point  d'appui  does   remain  to  us  in 
our  efforts  towards  an  assignment :  in  the  Apocalypse  Eome 
is   reckoned  as  the  deadly  enemy  of  the  new  faith  :    she  is 
drunken  with  the  blood  of  the  martyrs  ;  a  Pergamenian  Christ- 
ian is  mentioned  by  name  who  had  sealed  his  faith  with  his 
death,  and  not  he  alone,  but  many  others  ;  in  the  writer's  eyes, 
in  fact,  the  Church  has  definitely  become  a  Church  of  Martyrs.'' 
Now,  such  a  tone  is  not  to  be  explained  solely  on  the  ground 
of  the  Neronian  horrors  of  the  year  64,  and  of  the  occasional 
persecutions  on  the  part  of  *  those  set  in  authority,'  to 

1    1'.  2711.  -   ii.  H. 


' 

which 


§  22.]  THE   REVELATION    OF   JOHN  283 

even  the  Christians  of  Paul's  time  had  been  exposed  in  Asia 
Minor.  In  Kev.  vi.  10  the  martyrs  not  only  cry  to  God '  How  long 
dost  thou  leave  our  blood  unavenged  '?  '  but  they  are  consoled 
with  the  answer  that  *  their  fellow-servants  and  their  brethren 
which  should  be  killed  even  as  they  were '  must  first  have  ful- 
filled their  course.  The  Church  was  thus  prepared  for 
systematic  persecution  until  the  end  of  the  world  ;  perhaps 
at  the  moment  when  the  Apocalypse  was  written  a  fresh  out- 
burst of  persecuting  fury  was  seen  to  be  imminent.  But 
such  alarms  would  have  been  mere  extravagance  before  the 
last  years  of  Domitian  (81-96),  and  therefore  the  time 
between  95  and  100  is  probably  the  earliest  at  which  we  can 
possibly  place  the  book.  And  this  assignment  is  rendered 
still  more  acceptable  by  the  picture  given  in  the  Apocalypse  of 
the  condition  of  the  Christian  communities.  Ephesus  had 
forsaken  its  ( first  love ' l ;  Sardes  was  all  but  dead,  and  only 
possessed  '  a  few  names  which  did  not  defile  their  garments,' 2 
while  in  Laodicea  spiritual  life  had  become  wholly  dead. 
And  it  was  not  only  a  question  of  the  unconscious  dropping 
of  the  old  enthusiasm,  of  a  growing  secularisation ;  heretics, 
too,  had  made  their  way  into  the  churches — Balaamites  and 
Nicolaitans  (and  the  prophetess  Jezebel  ?) — who  actually 
taught  Antinomianism  and  Libertinism.3  Who,  then,  should 
these  false  teachers  be,  if  not  those  Gnostics  whom  we  have 
already  seen  attacked  in  1.  John,  Jude  and  2.  Peter,  especially 
as  they  boast  of  a  knowledge  that  reaches  down  to  the 
'  deep  things  of  Satan  ' 4  ? 

These  indications  in  favour  of  an  assignment  of  the 
Apocalypse  to  the  year  100  or  thereabouts,  are  counter- 
balanced by  others  which  point  towards  the  time  before  the 
year  70.  Most  of  the  arguments  brought  forward  in  this 
case,  however,  are  of  no  value,  owing  to  their  being  based 
upon  a  false  exegesis.  Those  who,  placing  all  their  con- 
fidence in  the  method  of  interpreting  the  Apocalypse  by  the 
light  of  contemporary  events,  searched  the  history  of  the  first 
century  for  a  Parthian  invasion,  a  Koman  punitive  expedition 
against  a  rebellious  province,  an  earthquake,  a  plague  of 
locusts  or  a  famine,  certainly  made  all  sorts  of  discoveries  ; 

1  ii.  4.  -  iii.  1-4.     Cf.  Jude  23.          a  ii.  14  fol.  and  24.          4  ii.  24. 


284          AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT  [BOOK  11. 

but  their  labour  was  unfortunately  wasted,  because  the  writer 
does  not  record  these  plagues  as  having  already  come  to  pass, 
but  announces  them  as  belonging  to  the  future.  No  more  is 
to  be  deduced  from  his  prophecies  than  that  he  himself 
knew  of  such  calamities,  either  from  his  own  experience, 
or  else  from  reading  or  from  popular  belief.  Rev.  xii.  6  has, 
however,  been  cited  as  favouring  an  assignment  to  the  year 
69  ;  the  woman  who  escapes  to  the  desert  for  three  and  a 
half  years  after  the  birth  of  her  son  is  supposed  to  represent 
the  Christian  community  of  Jerusalem,  which  withdrew  to  Pella 
beyond  Jordan  at  the  beginning  of  the  Jewish  war.  But  the 
writer  is  here  dealing  with  events  in  Heaven  l ;  it  is  not 
likely  that  he  would  have  looked  upon  the  community  of 
Jerusalem  as  the  Mother  of  Christ,  and  no  calculations  can  be 
based  upon  the  number  three  and  and  a  half,  which  belongs  to 
the  Apocalyptic  stock-in-trade.  Since,  in  fact,  Gunkel  made  his 
thorough  and,  it  is  to  be  hoped,  lasting  exposure  of  the  errors 
of  this  exegetic  method,  it  has  rather  seemed  as  if  we  may  no 
longer  expect  to  find  any  reference  in  the  strictly  Apocalyptic 
parts  of  the  book  to  the  writer's  own  time  or  to  that  which 
had  preceded  it.  Yet  this  is  not  so.  Like  all  Apocalyptic 
writers,  he  occasionally  finds  himself  in  a  position  to  con- 
nect the  future  with  the  past,  by  the  statement  and  justifica- 
tion of  a  chronological  scheme,  and  if,  again,  he  rejects  as 
impossible  an  event  belonging  to  the  future,  we  may  be 
certain  that  he  himself  had  not  witnessed  its  occurrence. 
This  last  case  is  exemplified  in  chap,  xi.,  the  former  in 
chaps,  xiii.  and  xvii.  In  xi.  1  the  seer  is  bidden  to  measure 
the  temple  of  God,  but  not  the  outer  court,  because  this  had 
been  given  to  the  Gentiles,  who  should  tread  the  holy  city 
under  foot  for  forty  and  two  months.  The  'forty  and  two 
months  '  must  be  taken  with  all  reserve,  but  it  is  nevertheless 
indisputable  that  such  a  sentence  must  have  been  written 
before  the  destruction  of  the  Temple  in  August  of  the  year 
70,  and  it  is  also  more  than  probable  that  it  was  written  when 
the  worst  fears  were  entertained  for  the  fate  of  the  rest  of  the 
city — that  is,  during  the  siege. 

It  is  quite  clear,  again,  that  the  sea-beast  of  chap.  xiii. 

1  xii.  1,  4,  7. 


§  22.]  THE    REVELATION    OF    JOHN  285 

is  meant  to  represent  the  Roman  Kmpiro,  jind  its  seven  heads 
upon  which  were  '  names  of  blasphemy,'  seven  emperors,  who 
lmd  arrogated  to  themselves  that  name  which  belonged  to  God 
alone — Augustus,  i.e.  Se/Sao-ros-, — and  also  other  titles,  such  as 
(Toyrijp  (Saviour),  which  robbed  Him  of  the  honour  due  to  none 
but  Himself.  Now,  since  Domitian  would,  reckoning  from 
Octavius  Augustus,  be  the  eleventh  emperor — or  if  we  omitted 
the  three  short  reigns  of  Galba,  Otho  and  Vitellius  (68-69), 
still  the  eighth — this  passage  about  the  seven  heads  could  not 
have  been  written  as  late  as  the  time  of  Domitian  (81-96),  but 
only  at  a  time  when  the  fall  of  the  world-empire  might  be 
hoped  for  immediately  after  the  reign  of  a  seventh  Emperor. 
One  of  these  heads  had,  according  to  xiii.  8,  been  '  smitten 
unto  death,'  but  the  death-stroke  was  healed,  and  the  respect 
of  the  world  for  the  beast  only  increased  :  to  whom,  then, 
should  this  refer  but  Nero,  who  died  in  the  summer  of  68, 
but  who,  according  to  the  popular  fancy,  still  lived  on,  so 
that  a  series  of  Nerones  redivivi  made  their  appearance  and 
sought  to  snatch  the  imperial  power  ?  Now  in  xiii.  18,  the 
number  of  the  beast — that  is  to  say,  probably  that  of  the  head 
which  was  healed,  since  it  was  also  the  '  number  of  a  man  ' — 
is  given  as  six  hundred  and  sixty  and  six,  which,  according  to 
the  value  of  the  letters  in  Hebrew,  has  been  interpreted  by  four 
German  scholars  of  our  own  time,  working  independently,  as 
'  Nero  Caesar.'  It  is  true  that  the  calculation  is  not  absolutely 
free  from  doubt,  for  it  would  be  false  if  the  variant  of  Irenaeus, 
'  six  hundred  and  sixteen,'  were  the  true  reading,  and  altogether 
-would  perhaps  seem  more  plausible,  considering  this 
reference  to  Nero  redivivus,  to  hold  with  Mommsen  that 
the  Apocalypse  belongs  to  the  end  of  the  reign  of  Vespasian 
(69-79),  since  it  was  then  that  the  first  pseudo-Nero  made  his 
appearance  in  the  East.  But  at  what  date  such  rumours 
might  have  arisen  among  the  people,  especially  in  Asia, 
we  do  not  know.  In  chap.  xvii.  the  writer  returns  once 
more  to  the  beast,  who  is  now  carrying  the  harlot  Babylon 
(i.e.  Rome)  ;  and  here  in  vv.  9  fol.  he  does  give  us  a  sort  of 
clue.  We  are  told  that  the  seven  heads  '  are  seven  kings  ' 
(i.e.  Emperors),  '  the  five  are  fallen,  the  one  is  '  (i.e.  the  sixth), 
'  the  other '  (the  seventh)  '  is  not  yet  come,  and  when  he 


286          AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT  [BOOK  n. 

cometh,  he  must  continue  a  little  while.  And  the  beast  that 
was,  and  is  not,  is  himself  also  an  eighth,  and  is  of  the  seven  ; 
and  he  goeth  into  perdition.'  According  to  this,  then,  the 
author  wrote  during  the  reign  of  the  sixth  Eoman  Emperor, 
i.e.  of  Galba  (68-69),  or,  more  probably,  since  Galba  would 
not  have  been  heard  of  much  in  the  East,  of  Vespasian,  whose 
son  and  successor,  Titus  (79-81),  would,  as  the  writer  thought, 
have  but  a  brief  reign,  reckoned  apocalyptically,  and  then  live  to 
see  the  fall  of  the  Koman  Empire.  But  no  ;  verse  11  tells  us 
that  an  eighth  was  yet  to  come,  who,  in  conjunction  with  all 
the  kings  of  the  earth  (ten  in  number),  should  'war  against 
the  Lamb,'  but  should  be  destroyed ;  now,  since  this  is  at  the 
same  time  one  of  the  seven,  it  can  only  refer  to  a  re-vivified 
Nero,  whose  speedy  re-appearance  was  so  generally  expected. 
The  words  '  the  sixth  king  is  ' l  absolutely  prohibit  that  assign- 
ment of  the  Apocalypse  to  the  time  of  Domitian  which  seemed 
just  now  so  probable  ;  although  verse  11  by  itself  might  have 
been  written  under  Domitian  if  the  author  had  meant  to  repre- 
sent him  as  a  second  Nero.  Here,  then,  we  are  confronted  by 
the  following  problem  :  while  the  greater  part  of  the  Apoca- 
lypse affords  no  data  for  determining  the  date  of  its  composi- 
tion, certain  indications  in  chaps,  xi.  xii.  xiii.  and  xvii.  oblige 
us  to  assume  that  it  was  written  in  the  period  between  the 
death  of  Nero  and  the  destruction  of  Jerusalem,  while  others 
again,  especially  in  chaps,  ii.  iii.  and  vi.,  seem  to  point  equally 
distinctly  to  a  time  at  least  twenty-five  years  later. 

8.  We  cannot  hope  to  master  these  difficulties  as  long  as 
we  regard  the  Apocalypse  as  a  perfectly  independent  work 
created  by  a  single  author.  The  contradictory  indications  of 
date  demand  the  supposition  that  there  exist  within  the  book 
different  elements,  which  were  not  brought  into  connection  until 
a  later  time.  Thus,  when  D.  Volter,  at  the  instigation  of  Prof. 
Weizsacker,  was  the  first  to  attempt,  in  1882,  a  reduction  of  the 
Apocalypse  into  a  number  of  smaller  Christian  Apocalypses  or 
fragments  of  such  writings,  criticism  made  a  great  step  in  ad- 
vance ;  and  a  further  step  was  taken  when,  in  1886,  E.  Vischer 
formally  recognised  the  Jewish  origin  of  the  groundwork 
of  the  Apocalypse,  and  sought  to  interpret  it  as  the  expanded 

1  xvii.  10. 


§22.]  TIN-:  Ki:vKi,vn<>N  01^  JOHN  287 

translation  made  by  a  Christian  of  the  next  generation,  of  the 
Aramaic  original  of  some  Jewish  writer.  Unfortunately,  new 
difficulties  here  arose,  for  Volter  himself  did  his  best  to  shake 
our  faith  in  his  theories  by  his  restless  love  of  throwing  out 
ever  newer  and  more  artificial  plans  of  the  process  of  develop- 
ment which  the  Apocalypse  was  supposed  to  have  undergone. 
For  the  last  two  decades,  German, '  Dutch 2  and  French 3 
scholars  have  vied  with  one  another  in  their  efforts  to  solve 
all  the  riddles  of  the  Apocalypse  by  the  combination  and 
emendation  of  those  two  fundamental  hypotheses ;  the  supposed 
sources  of  the  Apocalypse  become  more  and  more  numerous — 
some  are  Jewish,  some  Christian,  and  some  to  be  traced  to 
copyists  and  interpolators — but  at  present  the  only  result  of 
this  activity  has  been  that  the  uninitiated  receive  the  impres- 
sion that  nothing  is  certain  and  nothing  impossible  in  the  field 
of  New  Testament  research. 

Even  apart  from  the  contradictory  indications  of  date, 
however,  we  are  compelled  to  recognise  the  kernel  of  truth  in 
all  these  hypotheses  by  the  incongruity  existing  between 
certain  parts  of  the  Apocalypse  and  the  main  scheme,  or  even 
between  them  and  their  own  immediate  contexts.  All  runs 
smoothly  as  far  as  vi.  17,  but  then,  before  the  seventh  seal  is 
opened  in  viii.  1,  chapter  vii.  is  unexpectedly  thrust  before  our 
eyes,  containing  a  description  of  the  sealing  of  144,000  Israelites, 
and  introducing  us  to  an  innumerable  host  of  the  faithful 
servants  of  the  Lamb,  who  stand  before  the  throne  singing 
praises  to  God.  The  second  half  of  the  chapter  (vv.  9-17) 
is  of  course  the  complement  to  the  first  half,  felt  to  be 
necessary  from  the  standpoint  of  Christian  universalism, 
but  it  is  the  first  half  itself  (vv.  1-8)  which  appears  to  be 
an  interpolated  fragment.  The  four  winds  which  are  held 
back  for  a  moment  only  by  four  angels  (vv.  1-3)  are  after- 
wards forgotten,  nor  is  there  any  reference  further  on  to  the 
144,000  servants  of  God  sealed  from  the  twelve  tribes  of 
Israel,  for  no  one  could  identify  them  with  the  faithful  of 
9  fol.,  because  these  are  removed  far  beyond  the  power 
of  the  winds.  In  xiv.  1-5,  the  144,000  souls  who  stand 

1  E.g.,  F.  Spitta  and  K.  Erbes.  2  E.g.,  T.  G.  Weyland. 

3  E.g.,  A.  Sabatier  and  H.  Schoen. 


288          AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT  [BOOK  n. 

beside  the  Lamb  on  Mount  Zion  are  denned  as  the  '  virgins ' 
purchased  out  of  the  earth,  most  certainly  in  reference  to 
vii.  1-8  and  9-17.  But  here  it  is  obviously  a  question 
of  later  adaptation  ;  the  sealed  ones  of  vii.  3  are  not  a  group 
of  elect  Christians,  but  God's  servants  in  general ;  they  stand 
in  no  relation  whatever  to  the  Lamb  (but,  on  the  other 
hand,  cf.  vv.  9,  10,  14,  17,  and  xiv.  4) ;  and  the  list  of 
the  twelve  tribes  in  vii.  5-8  would  be  pointless  from  the 
mouth  of  a  Christian  who  saluted  the  community  of  Christ's 
servants  as  the  Twelve  Tribes  of  the  Dispersion.1  Nor  was 
the  writer  of  the  Apocalypse  the  man  to  create  himself  arti- 
ficial difficulties ;  in  vii.  1-8  he  simply  adapted  a  fragment 
of  a  Jewish  Apocalypse,  to  which  he  had  been  drawn  by  the 
idea  of  the  sealing  of  the  144,000,  and  then  in  two  suc- 
ceeding passages 2  he  partly  neutralised  it,  and  partly  ex- 
plained it  from  a  Christian  point  of  view.  The  incongruity 
of  the  opening  was  forgotten  in  the  attraction  exercised  by  the 
main  scene. 

Again,  vv.  x.  1-xi.  13  make  a  most  unexpected  inter- 
ruption in  the  drama  of  the  seventh  trumpet ;  chap.  x.  is  a 
prelude  to  the  strange  events  of  xi.  1-13,  the  scene  of  which,  as 
well  as  the  part  played  by  the  two  martyr  prophets,  remains 
full  of  mystery.  The  contrast  between  the  interest,  worthy 
of  a  Jewish  zealot,  displayed  in  vv.  1  and  3  in  temple,  altar 
and  worshippers,  and  the  wrath  of  the  Christian  in  verse  8 
against  the  great  city  'where  their  Lord  was  crucified,'  which 
1  spiritually  is  called  Sodom  and  Egypt,'  is  the  greatest  con- 
ceivable, while  in  vv.  9  and  10,  again,  it  is  not  unbelieving 
Israel,  but  the  dwellers  on  the  earth,  who  make  merry  over  the 
murder  of  the  prophets,  nor  is  the  murderer  Judah,  but  the 
'  beast  that  cometh  up  out  of  the  abyss.'  The  inconsistencies  of 
this  passage,  in  fact,  are  only  to  be  explained  on  the  supposi- 
tion that  the  writer  was  following  an  authority  which  he  partly 
reproduced,  and  partly  emended.  Here  again  we  may  look 
upon  it  as  certain  that  its  sources  were  Jewish  and  its  original 
language  Hebrew  or  Aramaic,  while  the  anti-Jewish  colour  in. •_• 
was  supplied  by  the  writer  of  vv.  ii.  9  and  iii.  9. 


1  Cf.  xxi.  12. 


vii.  9  fol.  and  xiv.  1  fol. 


§  22.]  TI1K    KKVKLATION    OK    JOHN  289 

In  the  more  than  singular  allegory  of  chap,  xii.,  again, 
the  repetition  of  verse  6  in  vv.  13  and  14  shows  that  his 
material  was  more  than  the  writer  could  manage,  and  in  any 
case  these  ideas,  which  he  has  so  much  difficulty  in  twisting 
into  a  Christian  shape,  were  certainly  not  of  genuine  Christian 
origin.  All  becomes  clear,  however,  if  we  look  upon  the 
passage  as  the  prophecy  of  one  of  those  Pharisees  who  saved 
themselves  from  the  Roman  armies  by  flying  from  Jerusalem 
during  the  Jewish  War,  between  66  and  69.  Most  of  it,  more- 
over, can  be  retranslated  into  Hebrew  without  any  difficulty. 
Lastly,  if  we  compare  chap.  xiii.  with  xvii.,  we  are  struck  both 
by  the  latter's  repetitions  and  discrepancies,  and  in  like 
manner  by  those  of  chap,  xviii.,  which  can  scarcely  be 
separated  from  xvii.  Can  xviii.  24  be  from  the  same  pen  as 
xi.  8b  ?  And  xxii.  3-5  only  repeats  in  different  words  what 
had  been  said  in  xxi.  22-26.  Instances  of  this  sort  are  bound 
to  shake  our  confidence  in  the  homogeneity  of  the  Apocalypse, 
while  the  analogy  of  numerous  other  writings  of  this  class 
naturally  suggests  the  idea  that  here,  too,  the  incongruous 
elements  are  the  result  of  revision,  interpolation,  and  passage 
through  different  hands.  Nor  is  the  motive  for  such  altera- 
tions (which  the  Apocalypse  feared  for  itself,  and  with  good 
reason  ')  far  to  seek  ;  certain  parts  would  grow  antiquated  and 
be  belied  by  events,  and  these  would  then  be  set  aside  or  else 
brought  up  to  date  by  glosses  and  interpolations.  Neverthe- 
less, the  uniformity  of  the  book  in  language,  style  and  tone 
must  not  be  forgotten,  and  especially  the  fact  that  the  general 
plan  —  introduction,  seven  epistles,  three  cycles  of  seven 
visions,  Kingdom  of  the  Messiah  on  earth,  end  of  the  world, 
New  Jerusalem,  and  finally  the  literary  conclusion — is  per- 
fectly straightforward.  What  we  have  before  us  is  no 
wretched  compilation,  but  a  firmly  welded  edifice ;  the  archi- 
tect of  this  whole  is  for  us  a  living  personality,  and  his  style, 
with  its  efforts  after  the  loftiest  heights,  is  characteristic  of  the 
whole  building ;  certain  barocco  additions  are  indeed  worked 
in,  yet  it  is  never  possible  to  detach  them  so  easily  from 
their  context  but  that  part  of  the  surrounding  building  shares 
their  fall.  Thus  the  different  hypotheses  of  interpolation, 

1  xxii.  18  fol. 


290        AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    [BOOK  n. 

revision  and  compilation  are  disposed  of,  and  it  is  only  the 
seer's  authorities  that  we  have  to  investigate.  And,  since 
in  those  parts  which  are  certainly  from  the  author's  own  pen 
nothing  points  to  a  time  before  70  A.D.,  we  shall  not  regard 
the  Apocalypse  as  a  production  of  the  year  69,  into  which  all 
kinds  of  later  material  have  been  interpolated,  but  rather  as 
the  work  of  a  Christian  of  about  the  year  95,  who  in  many 
places  inserted  older  Apocalyptic  fragments,  more  or  less 
adequately  harmonised  witli  the  context. 

Whether  these  older  fragments  belonged  to  one  or  more 
Apocalypses,  and  whether  they  are  directly  or  merely  in- 
directly of  Jewish  origin,  will  perhaps  never  be  determined 
with  absolute  certainty :  the  latter  especially,  because  in  the 
matter  of  eschatological  beliefs  the  Christian  growth  is  so 
closely  entwined  with  the  Jewish  parent  stem — except  where 
faith  in  Jesus  is  directly  concerned — that  the  two  are  indis- 
tinguishable. It  is  true  that  large  tracts  of  the  Apocalypse 
breathe  the  Jewish  spirit,  reflect  Jewish  hopes,  Jewish 
longings  for  revenge,  and  Jewish  ideas ;  but  might  not  a 
Christian  have  brought  such  feelings  with  him  from  his  own 
Jewish  past  ?  As  to  the  question  of  the  number  of  sources,  and 
still  more  that  of  their  reconstruction,  it  is  the  part  of  sober 
criticism  to  forego  any  attempt  to  answer  it  in  the  case  of  the 
Apocalypse  ;  the  writer  has  made  use  of  his  older  material  in 
far  too  arbitrary  a  way  for  that, — sometimes  completely 
remoulding  it,  sometimes  adapting  it  to  his  own  use  by 
insertions,  transpositions  or  omissions  ;  nor  should  it  be 
forgotten  that  he  is  borrowing  from  the  property  of  others, 
even  when,  without  any  actual  document  before  him,  he  is 
yet  making  use  of  earlier  Apocalyptic  material.  The  duty  of 
tracing  these  materials,  from  the  point  of  view  of  religious 
history,  far  back  to  their  possibly  distant  sources,  has  been 
demonstrated  most  powerfully  by  Gunkel,  who  has  at  the 
same  time  applied  sharp  and  salutary  criticism  both  to  certain 
prevailing  methods  of  literary  judgment  and  to  the  school  of 
interpretation  by  means  of  contemporary  history;  but  apart 
from  his  own  superstitious  belief  in  the  one  method  extra 
quam  nullasaluSyhe  shares  with  his  adversaries  the  prejudice 
of  regarding  the  writer  of  the  Apocalypse  as  a  corpus  vile 


§  ±2.}  THE  IM:VI:LATION  OF  JOHN  291 

which  takes  the  food  offered  it  and  must  assimilate  it  well  or 
ill.  On  the  contrary,  the  Seer  is  far  too  independent  to 
warrant  us  in  hunting  out  a  tradition  behind  everything  he 
says ;  where,  indeed,  as  in  chaps,  xiii.  and  xvii.,  or  xi.  and  xii.,  he 
cannot  work  out  his  allegory,  or  can  only  do  so  with  the  help 
of  artificial  or  violent  expedients,  then  we  may  be  sure  he  is 
resting  on  tradition,  oral  or  written  ;  but,  for  the  rest,  is  it  not 
possible  that  an  Apocalyptic  writer  may  have  shown  some 
fragments  of  the  gift  of  invention  ?  And  are  not  certain 
eccentricities  of  form  and  matter — a-/cdv&a\a — imposed  upon 
an  Apocalypse  by  its  very  genre  ?  Those,  then,  who  think 
themselves  justified  merely  on  the  ground  of  some  irregularity, 
some  contradiction  or  repetition,  in  explaining  it  by  a  theory 
of  interpolation,  mistake  the  true  character  of  the  book,  which 
in  its  fantastic  imagery,  spun  out  to  great  elaboration,  and  yet 
flowing  from  no  fresh  or  original  inspiration,  could  not  possibly 
observe  either  regularity  or  symmetry  of  style.  To  pretend  to 
have  found  an  answer  to  every  question  raised  by  the  Apo- 
calypse is  the  very  opposite  of  science. 


u  2 


292      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP. 


BOOK  III 

THE   HISTOBICAL   BOOKS   OF  THE 
NEW   TESTAMENT 

CHAPTEE   I 

THE  FOUR  GOSPELS 

[Cf.  B.  Weiss :  *  Die  vier  Evangelien  im  berichtigten  Text  mit 
kurzer  Erlauterung '  (1900) — the  notes  merely  intended  as  an 
introduction  to  the  revised  text  of  the  Gospels ;  G.  Volkmar : 
'  Marcus  und  die  Synopse  der  Evangelien '  (1876) — extremely 
original  and  suggestive,  but  eccentric  and  specially  prejudiced 
against  Matthew.  Further,  H.  Weisse  :  '  Die  Evangelienfrage  in 
ihrem  gegenwartigen  Stadium '  (1856) ;  C.  Weizsacker :  '  Unter- 
suchungen  iiber  die  evangelische  Geschichte  '  (1864) ;  E.  Eenan : 
1  Les  Evangiles  et  la  seconde  generation  chretienne '  (1877) ; 
P.  Ewald :  '  Das  Hauptproblem  der  Evangelienfrage  und  der 
Weg  zu  seiner  Losung '  (1890),  a  spirited  attempt  to  maintain 
the  Fourth  Gospel  intact  by  applying  the  most  vigorous  criticism 
to  the  Synoptics  ;  and  W.  Brandt :  '  Die  evangelische  Geschichte 
und  der  Ursprung  des  Christenthums '  (1893).  The  author  of 
this  book  is  a  second  Strauss  in  scepticism,  and  has  all  the  latter's 
learning,  independence  and  love  of  truth  without  his  '  mythological ' 
preconceptions,  but  unfortunately  lacks  a  touch  of  Kenan's  genius. 
Lastly,  Adolf  Harnack's  'Die  Chronologic  der  altchristlichen 
Literatur,'  vol.  i.  pp.  589-700  ('  Die  Evangelien  ') ;  G.  Dalman's 
1  Die  Worte  Jesu,'  vol.  i.  (1898)  ;  and  P.  Wernle's  '  Altchristliche 
Apologetik  im  N.  T.'  published  in  the  '  Zeitschrift  fur  die  Neu- 
testamentliche  Wissenschaft '  for  1900,  pp.  42-65 — a  clever  but 
somewhat  one-sided  attempt  to  explain  the  differences  between 
Mark  and  the  later  Gospels  as  the  result  of  the  needs  of  Christian 
Apologetics  against  Jews  and  Gentiles  respectively.] 


23.]  (IKNKKAL    KKMARKS    ON    T1IH    COSPKLS  293 


§  28.  General  Remarks  on  the  Gospels 

1.  For  about  a  hundred  years  the  Gospels  according  to 
Matthew,  Mark   and   Luke  have   been   called   the   Synoptic 
Gospels  in  contradistinction  to  the  Gospel  according  to  John, 
because  they  stand   in  such   close    and   at    the   same   time 
such   inextricable   mutual   relations   that   a   synopsis,   i.e.  a 
general  view  of  the  whole,  is  often  essential  even  for  a  proper 
understanding  of  the  text,  and  it  is  impossible  to  pass  judg- 
ment on  any  one  of  them  without  first  taking  the  others  into 
consideration.      For   comparative   study   of   this   kind   it   is 
hardly  possible  to  do  without  a  Synopsis  which  prints  the  text 
of  the  three  Evangelists  either  in  parallel  columns  or  else  one 
above  the  other,  so  that  the  reader  can  embrace  the  parallel 
passages  at  a  glance  and  find  the  peculiarities  of  each  single 
Gospel  ready   divided   by   external   marks   from   the   matter 
common  to  the  other  two  or  three. 

[The  '  Synopse  der  drei  ersten  Evangelien  '  by  A.  Huck  (1898), 
forming  an  appendix  to  Holtzmann's  '  Hand-Commentar,'  vol.  i. 
(1898),  is  most  conveniently  arranged,  while  B.  Heineke's  '  Synopse 
der  drei  ersten  kanonischen  Evangelien  mit  Parallelen  aus  Joh.' 
is,  though  on  a  different  system,  a  work  of  the  most  scrupulous 
care.  England,  however,  possesses  a  still  more  brilliant  example 
in  the  polychrome  '  Synopticon  '  of  W.  G.  Eushbrooke  (1880). 
A.  Wright's  '  Synopsis  of  the  Gospels  in  Greek '  (1896)  displays 
too  one-sided  an  interest  in  Mark,  and  its  supplement  in  the  same 
author's  '  The  Gospel  according  to  St.  Luke  in  Greek '  (upon 
which  a  similar  edition  of  Matthew  is  presumably  to  follow)  was 
necessary.  Unfortunately,  the  absence  in  all  these  Synopses  of 
the  variant  readings  is  much  felt.] 

2.  In  the  old  tradition  the  Synoptics  and  John  all  bear 
the  same  name,  Gospel  (according  to  Matthew,  Mark  etc. — 
Kara  MarOalov},  a  name  which    can  hardly  date  from  the 
writers  themselves.     In  the  New  Testament,  especially  in  the 
writings  of  Paul,  the  word  *  Gospel '  has  the  specific  meaning  of 
the  glad  tidings  of   the  fulfilment  of  all  prophecy  in  Jesus 
Christ,  and  of  the  kingdom  he  established.     Moreover,  when 
Paul  speaks  of  his  '  Gospel '  the  word  means  to  him  the  sum  of 


294      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

all  that  he,  as  an  Apostle,  has  to  communicate,  which  indeed 
consisted  in  '  Christ  alone'  Everyone,  however,  who  gave  up 
his  life  to  the  furtherance  of  this  message  was  an  Evangelist. 
But  with  Eusebius  (about  325  A.D.)  'Evangelist '  is  the  technical 
name  for  the  writers  of  the  canonical  Gospels,  of  which  he  speaks 
in  the  plural  quite  fluently,  for  meanwhile — and  indeed  con- 
siderably earlier,  in  Marcion's  time,  about  140  A.D. — '  Gospel ' 
had  become  the  term  for  a  certain  literary  species,  i.e.  for 
the  books  which  told  of  the  Life  and  Passion  and  Eesurrec- 
tion  of  the  Lord :  Origen  (circa  250)  speaks  without  any 
difference  of  meaning  of  the  Gospel  and  the  Gospels.  These 
are  the  books  which  Justin  terms  '  memoirs  of  the  Apostles/ 
and  Eusebius  the  '  Doings  '  or  *  History '  of  Jesus  (al  roi 
'ITJCTOV  Trpdgsis).  The  transition  from  the  wider  to  the  more 
limited  interpretation  of  the  word  was  an  easy  one  ;  and  a 
lingering  sense  of  the  original  meaning  of  the  word  Gospel— 
a  word  which  demands  in  reality  only  one  subjective  genitive 
('  God's  ')  and  one  objective  genitive  ('of  Jesus  Christ ') — can 
be  traced  in  the  fact  that  the  authors'  names  were  not  connected 
with  the  title  by  means  of  the  genitive  case  (as,  for  instance,  the 
Epistles  o/Paul),  but  through  the  medium  of  the  preposition 
/card.  This  formula  has  ever  since  been  retained  in  the  Latin 
Bible,  either  as  cata  or  as  secundum,  although  by  about  400 
A.D.  people  had  come  to  talk  quite  naturally  of  the  '  Evangeliuni 
sancti  Lucae.'  It  would  never  have  occurred  to  men  in  those 
days  to  argue  whether  Kara  Aov/cdv  had  from  the  beginning 
meant  the  immediate  author,  and  not  merely  the  authority  from 
whose  spoken  words  the  Gospel  had  been  written  down  by 
some  nameless  person,  even  though  /card  does  in  itself  admit 
of  different  interpretations. 

3.  The  Gospels  cannot  be  called  historical  books  if  the 
term  be  interpreted  as  applying  solely  to  books  which  owe 
their  entire  origin  either  to  a  mere  love  of  narrative,  or  to 
the  scientific  impulse  to  recall  the  past,  or  to  the  wish  to  gain 
insight  into  the  interdependence  of  past  events  and  to  pass 
judgment  upon  them.  The  same  may  be  said  of  the  Acts. 
The  Gospels  were  written  first  and  foremost  for  edification  — 
to  supply  the  need  of  the  community  which  grounded  its  faith 
on  the  words,  deeds  and  sufferings  of  Jesus,  and  which 


§  2:3.]  (iKM-KAL    IIKMARKS    ON    Till-:    (JOSPELS  295 

could  not  let  the  recollection  of  these  things — the  basis  of  its 
existence — be  covered  up  or  dimmed.  The  object  of  the 
Gospels  was  to  arouse  and  keep  for  ever  living  the  faith  in 
Jesus  Christ,  to  be  a  substitute  for,  or  perhaps  an  accompani- 
ment to,  the  personal  preaching  of  the  missionary,  and  they  were 
also  of  great  use  to  the  primitive  Christian  in  apology  and 
controversy.  But  they  pursued  their  object  through  the 
medium  of  historical  materials,  and  preserved  the  narrative 
form  of  writing ;  therefore,  in  spite  of  their  overwhelming 
religious  tendency,  they  still  have  a  claim  to  the  title  of 
historical  books,  at  least  as  much  as  the  books  of  the 
Maccabees,  and  more  than  the  t  Life  of  St.  Antony '  of 
Athanasius.  How  far  they  are  trustworthy  historical  sources 
is  another  question,  and  one  to  which  we  shall  revert  later  on. 
A  religious  intention  must  indeed  necessarily  influence  a  writer's 
choice  of  material,  but  it  need  not  prevent  him  from  telling 
the  truth.  Luke  certainly  claimed  to  be  an  historian,  and  all 
four  Gospels  have  at  least  as  much  right  to  be  included  in  the 
literature  of  history  as  many  a  modern  *  Life  of  Christ.' 

A.  THE  SYNOPTIC  GOSPELS 

[Cf.  B.  Weiss  :  *  Das  Marcusevangelium  und  seine  synoptischen 
Parallelen  '  (1872)  and  '  Das  Matthausevangelium  und  seine  Lucas- 
parallelen '  (1876) — very  thorough  exegesis  and  sober  criticism. 
Hand-Commentar,  vol.  i.,  '  Die  Synoptiker '  and  '  Die  Apostel- 
geschichte'  (both  by  Holtzmann  himself).  Further,  Holtz- 
mann's  other  work,  '  Die  synoptischen  Evangelien  '  (1863) ;  J.  C. 
Hawkins :  '  Horae  synopticae  '  (1899),  and  J.  Wellhausen's  '  Skizzen 
und  Vorarbeiten,'  vi.  pp.  187  fol.  (1899). 

It  seems  advisable  to  begin  our  examination  of  the  three 
Synoptic  Gospels  with  a  survey  of  their  contents,  the  outline  of 
the  story  of  Jesus  which  they  all  present  in  common ;  then  to 
consider  in  the  case  of  each  Gospel  independently  what  conclusions 
we  may  come  to  (whether  on  the  ground  of  tradition  or  on  that 
of  the  signs  and  indications  they  themselves  contain)  concerning 
questions  of  literary  history,  such  as  those  of  author,  individuality, 
date  and  motive  of  composition,  and  to  keep  the  subject  of  their 
mutual  relations  to  be  dealt  with  last.  Each  of  them  made 
its  appearance  independently,  and  each  of  them  may  there- 
fore claim  to  be  considered  independently,  both  as  to  what  it  has 


296      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

to  tell  and  how  it  tells  it.  This  arrangement  also  has  the 
advantage  of  securing  that  when  we  come  to  the  difficult  discussion 
of  the  Synoptic  Problem,  Matthew,  Mark  and  Luke  will  be  more 
to  us  than  empty  names,  and  that  this  discussion  itself  may  be 
considerably  shortened.] 

§  24.  The  Contents  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels 

In  Matthew  an  introduction  (chaps,  i.  and  ii.),  containing 
the  birth-story  etc.,  and  a  conclusion  (chaps,  xxvi.-xxviii.), 
dealing  with  the  Passion,  Death  and  Kesurrection  of  Jesus, 
are  clearly  marked  out  from  the  main  body  of  the  Gospel, 
which  is  a  narrative  of  the  public  ministry  of  Jesus.  In 
the  introduction  we  have  a  genealogy  of  Jesus,1  his  birth 
in  Bethlehem,2  and  the  flight  into  Egypt ::  in  consequence 
of  the  coming  of  the  Magi,  and  the  migration  to  Nazareth. 
Chaps,  iii.  1-iv.  16  contain  the  preaching  of  the  Baptist 
as  a  preparation  for  the  appearance  of  Jesus,  the  baptism  of 
Jesus,  the  temptation,  and  the  return  to  Galilee  (Capernaum). 
Chaps,  iv.  17-ix.  34  describe  his  first  activity  in  Galilee, 
and  how,  taking  up  the  Baptist's  cry  of  'repentance,'  he 
gathers  disciples  about  him  and  goes  through  the  country 
with  them  as  Teacher  and  Healer.  Examples  to  illustrate 
both  functions  are  given :  chaps,  v.-vii.  with  the  so-called 
Sermon  on  the  Mount — almost  a  Messianic  manifesto — 
exemplify  his  teaching,  and  chaps,  viii.-ix.  give  ten  cases  of 
healing  (the  leper,  the  centurion's  servant  at  Capernaum, 
Simon's  wife's  mother,  the  calming  of  the  storm  on  the  lake, 
the  two  demoniacs  in  the  country  of  the  Gadarenes,  the  man 
sick  of  the  palsy,  the  raising  of  the  ruler's  daughter,  the  woman 
with  an  issue  of  blood,  the  two  blind  men,  the  dumb  man 
possessed  with  a  devil).  Chaps,  ix.  35-xiii.  58  are,  as  it  were, 
a  second  act,  to  be  read  side  by  side  with  the  first  rather  than 
after  it ;  the  introductory  passage  (ix.  35-38)  is  a  complete 
parallel  to  iv.  23  fol.  and  the  calling  of  the  disciples 4  corre- 
sponds to  iv.  18-22.  But  the  difficulty  of  the  task  of  Christ 
in  now  becoming  more  apparent ;  in  x.  1-42,  with  forebodings 
already  dark  and  sad,  he  appoints  the  Twelve  to  be  assistant 
preachers  of  the  Kingdom  ;  a  propos  of  the  mission  of  the 

1  i.  1    17.  2  i.  18-25.  3  (.'Imp.  ii.  4  x.  1    I. 


§  L'i.]  THE  CONTENTS  OF  TIIK  SYNOPTIC  flOSPKLS  297 

imprisoned  Baptist,  in  chap.  \i.,  he  prophesies — or  asserts 
— the  partial  failure  of  his  own  Gospel  (Chorazin  and  Beth- 
saida).  Now  we  see  him  in  conflict  with  the  self -conceited 
piety  and  the  wilful  blindness  of  the  Pharisees  (the  plucking 
of  the  ears  of  corn,  the  healing  of  the  sick  on  the  Sabbath-day, 
and  the  ascription  of  his  miraculous  powers  to  Beelzebub), 
and  next  with  the  insensibility  of  his  own  near  kin  and  of 
his  Nazarene  fellow-countrymen  (chap,  xii.,  and  xiii.  53-58). 
The  parables  inserted  in  xiii.  1-52  show  that  he  has  by 
now  given  up  the  hope  of  a  recognition  of  the  truth  by  the 
multitude  at  large.  Chaps  xiv.  1-xviii.  35  form  the  third 
act  of  his  Galilean  activity  ;  the  separation  is  now  complete 
between  him  and  his  countrymen.  The  story  of  the  execution 
of  the  Baptist  (xiv.  1-12)  is  a  fitting  prologue  ;  after  this 
Jesus  flees  into  the  wilderness,  feeds  the  five  thousand  with 
five  loaves  and  two  fishes  (duplicated  in  xv.  32fol.),  appears  to 
his  disciples  walking  on  the  lake,  and  is  acknowledged  by  them 
to  be  the  Son  of  God  (xiv.  23). 

After  drawing  the  distinction  between  the  false  and  the 
true  conception  of  uncleanness  in  xv.  1-20,  Jesus  consents  to 
shed  his  blessing  even  on  the  pagan  districts  of  Tyre  and 
Sidon  (healing  of  the  Canaanitish  woman's  daughter1),  and 
amid  the  full  tide  of  his  miraculous  deeds  he  gives  a  stern 
refusal  to  the  demand  of  the  Pharisees  and  Sadducees  for  a 
sign.2  Peter's  confession  at  Caesarea  Philippi — *  Thou  art  the 
Christ,  the  Son  of  the  living  God  ' 3 — now  fills  him  with 
surprise  as  coming  from  the  ranks  of  the  Twelve,  who  had  but 
just  before  4  shown  a  remarkable  want  of  understanding  of  his 
words,  but  he  accepts  it  joyfully  as  a  divine  revelation  vouch- 
safed to  the  disciple  who  was  appointed  as  the  rock-foundation 
of  the  new  community  of  the  Kingdom.  He  proceeds  at  once, 
however,  to  warn  them  against  deceitful  hopes  :  as  he  himself 
must  suffer  and  die,  in  spite  of  his  Messiahship,  before  the 
Resurrection  came  to  pass,  so  must  his  faithful  followers  take 
up  his  Cross  in  self-denial,  in  order  that  when  he  returned  in 
glory  they  should  receive  an  eternal  reward.5  To  confirm 
their  faith  in  his  Messiahship,  three  disciples  now  behold  the 

1  xv.  21-28.  2  xv.  29-xvi.  4.  3  xvi.  13-16. 

4  xvi.  5-12.  5  xvi.  16-28. 


298      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

transfiguration  of  their  Master  on  a  '  high  mountain,' l  and 
to  the  end  of  chap,  xviii.  Jesus  exerts  himself  in  many 
different  directions  to  prepare  his  followers  for  the  time  when 
they  would  be  left  alone,  and  especially  to  familiarise  them 
with  his  own  conviction  of  the  necessity  of  his  death.  In 
xix.  1  he  turns  his  steps  towards  Judaea  on  the  last  fatal 
journey — always  ready  to  make  use  of  any  opportunity  of 
strengthening  and  enlightening  his  disciples— and  enters 
Jerusalem  in  triumph  as  Messiah.  By  the  cleansing  of  the 
temple  he  excites  the  fury  of  the  authorities,  and  then  fore- 
tells their  downfall  in  symbolical  actions  and  in  the  parables 
of  xxi.  28  fol.,  33  fol.,  and  xxii.  1  fol.  After  a  victorious 
argument  with  the  Pharisees  (the  tribute-money,  the  great 
commandment  of  the  law)  and  the  Sadducees  (non-existence  of 
marriage  in  the  resurrection),  he  casts  them  off  in  chap, 
xxiii.,  with  terrible  denunciations.  Chaps,  xxiv.  and  xxv.  con- 
tain his  last  testament  to  the  disciples,  in  which  he  first  describes 
the  Last  Things  in  apocalyptic  colours,  and  then  shows  them, 
through  the  parables  of  the  ten  virgins  and  the  talents  and 
by  the  picture  of  the  Last  Judgment,  how  to  draw  the  true 
practical  conclusions  from  this  knowledge.  After  the  pre- 
parations described  in  xxvi.  1  fol.  (the  anointing  in  Bethany, 
to  prepare  me  for  burial '),  Jesus  keeps  the  Passover  with  his 
disciples  (20-29)  ;  now  follow  (vv.  30-46)  the  moving  scenes  on 
the  Mount  of  Olives  and  in  the  Garden  of  Gethsemane,  then 
(vv.  47-56)  his  capture,  his  trial  before  Caiaphas  and  the 
denial  by  Peter  (vv.  52-75).  In  xxvii.  1-10  we  have  his 
death  sentence,  the  repentance  of  Judas,  the  confirmation 
of  the  sentence  by  the  Eoman  governor  (vv.  11-26),  and 
finally  (vv.  27-56)  his  mockery,  crucifixion  and  death. 
Vv.  xxvii.  57-66  relate  the  burial  of  Jesus  and  the  watching 
by  his  grave ;  on  the  third  day  -  the  women  find  the  grave 
empty,  but  are  told  by  an  angel  that  Jesus  is  risen  and 
will  appear  to  his  disciples  in  Galilee.  This  comes  to  pass 
in  xxviii.  16-20,  where  the  risen  Christ,  invested  with  all 
power  in  heaven  and  earth,  sends  them  forth  to  teach  and 
baptise  all  peoples. 

In  bulk,  Mark  falls  short  of  Matthew  by  about  three- 

1  xvii.  1-9.  2  xxviii.  1-15. 


§  24.]  Till']    CONTENTS    OF    TIIK    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS 

eighths,  but  this  discrepancy  is  due  but  little  to  Mark's  con- 
cluding section,  for  in  this  part l  there  is  the  least  amount 
of  divergence  between  two  chroniclers,  both  in  the  sequence 
of  events  and  in  detail.  But  the  differences  in  the  beginning 
are  all  the  greater.  In  i.  14  Mark  has  already  reached 
the  point  which  Matthew  only  arrives  at  in  iv.  17.  Mark 
has  no  birth-story  like  that  of  Matthew,  but  only  a  brief 
introduction  skilfully  concentrating  our  interest  upon  the 
main  point,  and  giving  a  short  account  of  John's  preaching  of 
repentance,  his  baptising  and  his  prophecies  concerning  the 
Messiah,'2  as  well  as  of  Jesus's  baptism  by  the  Holy  Ghost  and 
of  his  life  in  the  wilderness.3  Then  he  turns  to  the  public 
ministry  of  Jesus,  with  which  he  occupies  himself  from  i.  14 
to  xiii.  37.  As  far  as  ix.  50  the  scene  of  the  ministry  is  laid 
in  Galilee  and  the  districts  lying  to  the  north  or  east  of  it ; 
afterwards,  in  chaps,  x.-xiii.,  in  Judaea,  and  in  Jerusalem 
itself  after  his  entry  into  that  city.1  In  this  last  half  the 
arrangement  of  the  material  varies  very  little  from  the 
arrangement  in  Matthew,  except  that  in  Mark  we  have  no 
parallel  whatever  to  Matt.  xxv.  and  only  a  partial  parallel  to  the 
'  Woes  '  uttered  in  Matt,  xxiii.  The  eschatological  discourse 
in  Mark  xiii.  is  also  shorter  than  that  in  Matt.  xxiv.  Matthew 
lacks  only  the  beautiful  story  of  the  widow's  mite  given  in 
Mark  xii.  41-44,  as  also  in  Luke  xxi.  1-4.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  arrangement  adopted  in  the  Galilean  part  of  Mark,  i.  14- 
ix.  50,  is  peculiar  and  worthy  of  note,  because  in  it  we  can 
perceive  an  approach  to  historical  development.  First,  in 
i.  14-45,  the  appearance  of  Jesus  causes  only  a  sort  of  amazed 
excitement ;  in  ii.  1  his  struggle  begins,  and  in  iii.  6  Pharisees 
and  Herodians  are  already  plotting  his  downfall ;  in  iii.  7  fol. 
we  have  a  living  picture — lighted  up  by  the  dazzling  glory 
of  his  miracles,  proving  him  as  they  did  to  be  the  Son  of 
God — of  the  Galilean  Messiah  in  his  intercourse,  first,  with 
the  '  multitude ;  (from  whom,  however,  he  is  obliged  to  with- 
draw himself  further  and  further  in  painful  discourage- 
ment), next,  with  the  governing  classes  roused  to  mortal 
hostility  against  him,  and  lastly,  with  his  own  disciples,  who 

1  Mark  chaps,  xiv.-xvi  =  Matt,  chaps,  xxvi.  xxviii. 
3  i.  4-8.  3  i.  9-13.  4  xi.  1-11. 


300      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

still  stood  so  much  in  need  of  careful  instruction.  Of  course 
Mark  does  not  group  his  events  exclusively  or  even  funda- 
mentally according  to  a  chronological  system ;  here,  as  in  the 
other  two  Synoptics,  we  can  detect  a  preference  for  connecting 
events  by  their  subjects  :  ii.  18-iii.  6  (the  dispute  about  fasting 
and  the  two  instances  of  healing  on  the  Sabbath)  are  examples. 
In  the  whole  section  i.  14  to  xiii.  37  the  deficit  in  Mark  as  com- 
pared with  Matthew  is  primarily  concerned  with  the  sayings 
of  Jesus  ;  Mark  contains  no  Sermon  on  the  Mount  at  all,  and 
the  discourse  at  the  sending  forth  of  the  disciples  is  reduced — 
like  the  declaration  of  woe  to  the  Pharisees — to  a  few  sen- 
tences. The  chapter  of  parables  and  the  last  words  to  the 
disciples  are  also  much  more  briefly  given. 

3.  The  third  synoptist,  Luke,  also  comes  closest  to  the 
other  two  in  the  concluding  section,  chaps,  xxii.-xxiv.  But 
the  resurrection  episode  is  a  good  deal  more  detailed  in  Luke, 
and  he  makes  the  risen  Lord  appear  first  of  all — though  it 
is  just  possible  that  verse  xxiv.  34  implies  a  previous  appear- 
ance to  Peter — to  two  disciples  on  the  road  from  Jerusalem  to 
Emmaus,  and  then  to  the  eleven  in  Jerusalem  itself,  where 
Jesus  gives  them  careful  instructions  before  he  finally  takes 
leave  of  them,  with  a  solemn  benediction,  in  Bethany. 
Luke's  version  of  the  public  ministry  of  Jesus  between 
chaps,  iv.  14  and  xxi.  35  covers  about  the  same  ground 
and  strikes  about  the  same  balance  of  word  and  deed 
as  Matthew's  narrative.  All  that  precedes,  in  the  one  as 
in  the  other,  falls  naturally  into  an  historical  introduction 
and  into  the  preparations  for  the  appearance  of  Jesus.  Never- 
theless, the  differences  are  greater  than  the  resemblances.  The 
genealogy  of  Jesus  given  by  Matthew  in  i.  1  is  only  inserted 
by  Luke  in  iii.  23-38.  He  begins  with  a  prologue  about 
the  purpose  of  his  work  (i.  1-4),  and  his  version  of  the  story 
of  the  birth  and  childhood  reminds  us  but  occasionally  of  the 
far  shorter  and  more  compact  version  of  Matthew.  In  iii. 
1-20  Luke  gives  us  the  story  of  John  up  to  his  imprisonment, 
having  already  related  his  miraculous  birth  in  chap.  i.  ; 
then  in  iii.  21  fol.  he  pusses  rapidly  over  the  baptism  of  Jesus 
and  in  iv.  1-13  over  his  temptation.  How  little  we  can  count 
in  Luke  on  a  chronologically  correct  arrangement  of  the 


§  24.]  THE  CONTENTS  OF  TIIK  SYNOPTIC  GOSPELS  301 

material  in  the  main  section  (chaps,  iv.  14  to  xxi.  38),  is 
shown  at  the  very  beginning  (iv.  16-20),  in  the  story  of  his 
rejection  by  the  Nazarenes,  where  a  reference  is  made  to  some 
previous  activity  in  Capernaum,  whereas  it  is  not  till  iv.  31 
that  his  first  appearance  in  Capernaum  is  described.  Down 
to  ix.  50  Luke  tells  us  of  Christ's  activity  in  Galilee  in  striking 
agreement  with  Mark's  arrangement  of  events,  except  that  in 
vi.  20-49  he  inserts  a  short  pendant  to  Matthew's  Sermon  on 
the  Mount  --a  sermon  in  the  plain.  At  this  point,  however, 
the  parallel  ceases.  A  mass  of  narratives,  sayings  and 
dialogues  are  introduced  that  either  do  not  occur  in  Mark  and 
Matthew,  or  else  are  given  there  in  other  places  and  with 
wholly  different  contexts.  Only  in  xviii.  15  does  Luke  con- 
verge again  with  Mark,  shortly  before  the  entry  of  Jesus  into 
Jerusalem  in  xix.  28  fol.  Everything  that  lies  between  ix.  50 
and  this  point — generally  known  as  Luke's  Itinerary — is 
supposed  to  have  happened  on  the  journey  from  Galilee  to 
Jerusalem  through  Samaria.  The  last  part  in  Judaea  is  not 
so  long  in  Luke  as  in  the  other  two,  chiefly  because  he  has 
already  included  much  of  what  is  then  told  by  them,  in  his 
Itinerary.  But  the  facts  that  are  common  to  all  three  come 
in  the  same  order  here  as  in  Matthew  and  Mark  :  the  story  of 
the  healing  of  the  blind  Bartimeus,  for  instance,  the  entry  into 
the  capital,  the  cleansing  of  the  Temple,  the  questioning  of 
the  power  of  Jesus,  the  parable  of  the  vineyard,  the  disputes 
with  the  Pharisees  and  Sadducees,  the  declaration  of  Woe 
and  the  prophecies  concerning  the  last  things.1  Such  a  wide- 
spread agreement  makes  the  peculiarities  of  Luke  in  ix.  fol.  and 
in  chaps,  i.,  ii.  and  xxiv.  all  the  more  remarkable. 

§  25.  The  Gospel  according  to  Matthew 

[For  books  to  be  consulted  see  §§  23  and  24.  For  special 
commentaries  see  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  i.  1,  by  B.  Weiss 
(1899),  and  P.  Schanz's  '  Kommentar  iiber  das  Evangelium  des 
heiligen  Matthaus '  (1870).  The  author  of  this  last  is  probably 
the  most  thorough  and  unprejudiced  exegete  that  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church  possesses  at  the  present  day.  For  the  points 
discussed  in  paragraph  5,  see  W.  Soltau's  article  in  the  '  Zeit- 

1  Luke  xxi.  5  fol. 


302      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

schrift  fur  die   Neutestamentliche  Wissenschaft,'   part   i.,    1900, 
entitled  '  Zur  Entstehung  des  ersten  Evangeliums  '  (pp.  219-248).] 

1.  The  Gospel  of  Matthew  was  used,  though  anonymously, 
by  most  of  the  Christian  writers  of  the  second  century.  But 
considering  the  freedom  of  quotation  of  those  days,  it  is  hardly 
possible,  nor  is  it  worth  while,  to  make  a  list  of  authors  who 
can  be  proved  to  have  been  acquainted  with  Matthew.  As 
far  as  we  know,  the  authorship  of  the  Gospel  by  the  Apostle 
Matthew  was  never  once  questioned.  It  was  universally  held 
to  be  the  oldest,  and  Eusebius  for  one  has  details  of  its  origin 
to  give  us,1  to  the  effect  that  when  Matthew  was  going  on  to 
preach  to  other  peoples  after  leaving  the  Jews,  he  left  behind 
him  his  Gospel,  in  the  mother  tongue,  as  a  substitute  for  his 
own  personal  ministration.  Origen  (about  240)  was  already 
aware  that  the  Gospel  had  been  written  for  the  converted  Jews, 
and  Irenaeus  speaks  of  its  being  written  in  Palestine  at  the  time 
when  Peter  and  Paul  were  preaching  the  Gospel  in  Rome. 
But  the  special  emphasis  laid  by  all  these  critics  on  the  words 
'  written  in  the  Hebrew  tongue '  betrays  the  source  whence  all 
their  knowledge  springs,  namely  Papias.'  Papias  is  quoted 
by  Eusebius  in  his  '  Historia  ecclesiastica ' 3  in  the  following 
terms  :  '  Matthew  wrote  down  the  Sayings  in  the  Hebrew 
tongue,  and  everyone  translated  them  for  himself  as  best  he 
could.'  I  consider  it  to  be  beyond  dispute  that  Papias  was 
here  giving  information  concerning  what  is  now  our  First 
Gospel,  and  that  he  regarded  it  as  a  Greek  version  of  a  Gospel 
written  in  Hebrew  by  the  Apostle  Matthew.  I  think  it 
probable,  too,  that  if  he  owed  his  information  to  the  '  Presbyter/ 
the  latter  understood  the  same  thing  by  it  as  he  himself,  and 
that  when  Papias  inquired  of  him  as  to  Matthew's  book  he 
and  his  questioner  were  not  talking  at  cross  purposes.  Never- 
theless, although  the  fact"seems  highly  favourable  to  this  view 
that  in  Matt.  ix.  9-13  the  call  of  the  publican  Matthew  to 
the  ranks  of  the  disciples  is  told  at  particular  length,1  while 
in  the  parallels  to  this  passage r>  the  name  of  the  publican  is 
given  as  Levi,  it  at  once  gives  rise  to  the  gravest  objections. 

1   I  fist.  KccL  iii.  24,  f,.  -\  A.D.  165.  *  s  iii.  39,  16. 

1  Cf.  '  Matthew  the  publican  '  in  the  list  of  the  Apostles  Matt.  x.  3. 
4  Mark  ii.  14  fol. ;  Luke  v.  27  fol. 


§  25.]  THE    GOSPEL    ACCORDING    TO   MATTIIHW  303 

The  Gospel  according  to  Matthew  as  we  have  it  to-day 
cannot  possibly  be  the  translation  of  a  Hebrew  original. 
Not  only  does  its  clear  and  fluent  Greek,  which  is  much  less 
tinged  with  Hebrew  than  that  of  Mark,  forhid  such  an 
assumption,  but  the  writer  frequently  makes  use  of  such 
forms  as  the  genitive  absolute,  subordinate  clauses  and  the 
antithesis  of  JJLSV  and  <SV,  while  the  uniformity  of  style  and 
vocabulary  displayed  by  the  whole  Gospel  is  such  as  no 
ordinary  translator  could  have  attained  to.1  Even  plays  on 
Greek  words,  like  that  of  xxiv.  30 — KQ^OVTCLI  ical  o-fyovrcu— 
are  to  be  met  with.  It  is  true  that  part  of  the  Old  Testament 
quotations  are  taken  from  the  Hebrew  text  (e.g.  in  xiii.  35;l 
for  '  I  will  utter  things  hidden  from  the  beginning  of  the 
world  '  we  have  spsv^ofiai  fcsicpv^fisva  CLTTO  KaTafto\)j$  instead 
of  the  Septuagint  rendering  ^Osy^o/jLai  7rpo^\rj^ara  air  dpxfis, 
while  on  the  other  hand  35''  corresponds  word  for  word  with 
the  Septuagint 2),  but  part  of  them  are  also  identical  with  the 
Septuagint  renderings,  particularly  in  cases  where  the  Maso- 
retic  text  would  be  of  no  use,  and  where  the  whole  story 
depends  upon  the  Greek — e.g.  xxi.  16,  where  we  read  with  the 
Septuagint  '  Out  of  the  mouths  of  babes  and  sucklings  thou 
hast  perfected  praise,'  as  against  the  Hebrew  version  '  Through 
the  mouth  of  babes  and  sucklings  thou  hast  established  might 
[or  a  bulwark].' 3  Finally,  we  shall  show  later  on  that  Matthew 
reproduces  older  Greek  authorities  practically  without  modifi- 
cation, and  for  anyone  possessing  sane  common  sense  this 
should  surely  settle  the  question  of  its  original  language  once 
and  for  all. 

I  certainly  do  not  wish,  however,  to  dispute  the  writer's 
knowledge  of  the  Hebrew  idiom,  although  many  of  the  instances 
brought  forward  to  prove  it — such  as  the  word-play  on  '  master 
of  the  house  '  and  '  Beelzebub '  in  x.  25 — should  rather  be  laid  to 
the  score  of  Jesus  than  to  that  of  the  Evangelist,  while  I  am  not 
prepared  to  think  that  he  was  the  first  and  only  writer  who 
interpreted  the  Hebrew  name  '  Jesus  '  as  that  of  '  the  Saviour.' 

1  E.g.,  r6re,  ical  foot,  in  referring  to  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven,  the  end  of  the 
world,  etc. 

2  Compare  also  Matt.  viii.  17  and  Isaiah  liii.  4". 

3  Cf.  xi.  10,  xiii.  14  fol. 


304       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  I. 

But  Old  Testament  quotations  like  that  of  xxvii.  9  do  betray 
the  Hebrew  student,  though  not — especially  when  one  thinks 
of  Paul,  Mark,  John  ! — the  Hebrew  writer.  Nor  does  the 
statement  of  Irenaeus,  that  the  heretical  Jewish  Christians 
known  as  Ebionites  and  Nazarenes  used  the  Gospel  of  Matthew 
alone,  of  which  he  believed  the  Church  to  possess  a  Greek 
version,  take  us  any  further,  for  we  may  doubt  whether 
Irenaeus  ever  saw  this  Hebrew  Gospel  of  the  Ebionites,  and 
perhaps  he  merely  concluded  on  the  authority  of  Papias  that 
it  must  be  identical  with  Matthew.  Jerome,  who  displayed  a 
scientific  interest  in  the  Gospel  according  to  the  Hebrews  (TO 
svayy=\iov  Ka0'  'Eppaiovs),  of  which  he  found  a  copy  in  the 
library  of  Caesarea,  expressly  states  that  this  was  the  Hebrew 
foundation  of  the  Canonical  Matthew,  and  such  an  identifica- 
tion would  not  have  been  displeasing  to  the  Jewish  Christians. 
But  the  very  fact  that  Jerome  claims  to  have  made  both  a 
Greek  and  a  Latin  translation  of  the  Gospel  according  to  the 
Hebrews  shows  that  there  must  have  been  considerable 
differences  between  it  and  Matthew,  otherwise  such  a  task 
would  not  have  been  worth  while.  And  indeed  the  fragments 
— unfortunately  all  too  few — that  still  remain  to  us  of  the 
Gospel  to  the  Hebrews  1  differ  so  markedly  from  Matthew, 
both  in  form  and  matter,  that  we  cannot  even  accept 
the  theory  that  both  works  were  based  upon  a  common 
Hebrew  foundation,  recast  in  the  one  case  in  the  interests  of 
the  Church  universal,  and  in  the  other  in  those  of  the  Juda- 
istic  party. 

Are  we,  then,  to  ignore  the  Papias  tradition  altogether? 
Schleiermacher  has  gained  wide  acceptance  for  an  hypothesis  of 
compromise,  according  to  which  this  statement  of  Papias  did 
not  refer  to  our  First  Gospel  at  all,  but  to  an  older  document, 
possibly  made  use  of  by  its  author  and  consisting  merely  in  a 
collection  of  Logia.  He  contends  that  the  '  Presbyter '  was 
speaking  only  of  Logia,  that  is  of  sayiiif/x,  and  that  this  was 
a  title  wholly  inapplicable  to  a  Gospel  containing  so  much 
narrative  matter  as  Matthew.  It  is  certainly  true  that  Papias 
had  just  defined  the  contents  of  Mark  us  '  that  which  Jesus 

1  Collected,  with  a  critical   commentary,  by  11.  JIandmann  in   Tcxte  und 
Untcrsuchungcn,  \.  3,  1888,  entitled  Das  Hdm'icr  Evanyclmm. 


§  25.]  Till-    (iosi'UL   ACCORDING   TO    MATTHK\V  305 

spoke  or  did  '  (77  Xs^Osvra  ?;  repaid svr a),  and  that  this  sounds 
like  a  conscious  differentiation  between  Mark  and  the  more 
limited  work  of  Matthew  ;  true,  too,  that  the  words  ^p^rivsvcre 
&  avrd   produce  the   impression  that   Papias  was  speaking 
of    oral   translation    as    occasion    or   necessity    arose,   and 
especially  in  connection  with  the  reading  aloud  in  the  Church 
services.     But  Papias  is  not  really  so  very  precise  in  his  defi- 
nitions, for  three  lines  farther  on  in  his  passage  about  Mark 
he  speaks  only  of '  sayings  of  the  Lord '  (tcvpiaicol  \6jot)  even  in 
his  case,  while  on  a  closer  examination  we  are  bound  to  consider 
the  sp/jLTjvsta  in  the  case  of  Matthew  as  written  and  not  oral. 
The  point  of  the  statement  would  be  wholly  mistaken  if  we  sup- 
posed that  any  special  stress  was  laid  on  the  object,  ra  \6yia, 
or  even  on  the  predicate  o-wsypd^aro ;  the  stress  lies,  on  the 
contrary,  solely  on  the  words  s/3pat$L  Sia\s/crq).     By  the  words 
ra  \6yia  the  contents  of  Matthew's  book  are  at  once  briefly 
summarised,  a  parte  potiori,  and  solemnly  characterised  as 
oracles,  such  as  form  the  content  of  the  historical  books  of 
the  Old  Testament.    Matthew's  authorship  is  taken  for  granted, 
but  the  problem  remained  to  be  solved  as  to  how  the  world 
came  to  possess  a  Greek  work  from  the  hand  of  the  Jewish  " 
tax-gatherer.     The  answer  was  that  he  himself  had  written  it 
in  his  mother-tongue,  but  that  others — obscure,  unknown  men    • 
—had  translated  it  into  Greek.     A  certain  shade  of  depre- 
ciation lies  in  the  word  '  everyone  '  as  well  as  in  the  '  as  best 
he  could  ' ;  both  expressions  are  meant  to  imply  the  inferiority 
of  the  translation.     It  would,  however,  be  a  hasty  inference  to 
say  that  the  speaker  had  really  known  many  different  versions  ; 
he  might  at  most  have  concluded  something  of  the  sort  from 
the   complaints    of    others    as    to    the   great    discrepancies 
apparent  in  the  material  of  what  the  Christians  circulated  as 
their  'Gospel.'      Papias— or  his   informant — was  measuring 
Matthew  as  well  as  Mark  against  a  Norm-Gospel,  which  can 
scarcely  have  been  other  than  John ;  he  could  not  deceive 
himself   as   to   the  differences   between  them,  nor   could  he 
venture   simply  to  dispute  the  authority  of  the  others,  and 
therefore  he  makes  an  indirect  attack  upon  them  :  certainly,  he 
implies,  he  has  not  a  word  to  say  against  Peter  or  against 
Matthew,  but,  after  all,  their  Gospels  did  not  faithfully  express 

x 


306        AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  I. 

the  Apostles  themselves,  but  only  the  work,  carried  out  as  it 
was  under  different  conditions,  of  their  interpreters. 

With  this  admission  our  informant  has  already  deprived 
the  Matthew  of  the  Greek  Church  of  direct  Apostolic  origin. 
Here  he  is  quite  right,  for  a  work  which  we  shall  show 
to  be  dependent  upon  various  authorities,  some  of  which  were 
themselves  not  at  first  hand,  cannot  indeed  be  from  the  pen  of 
an  Apostle,  of  one  of  the  Twelve  :  but,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the 
book  nowhere  sets  up  the  smallest  claim  to  Apostolic  author- 
ship. It  is,  of  course,  possible  that  the  markedly  legendary 
features  of  the  narrative  might  have  been  preserved  to  us  by 
an  Apostle  as  well  as  by  anyone  else — perhaps  even  those  of 
the  birth-story — if  he  had  himself  received  them  from  others. 
But  the  arrangement  of  the  Gospel  is  so  artificial,  so  lacking 
in  the  unimportant  traits,  the  sure  pegs  on  which  all  kinds 
of  detail  depend  that  are  never  lost  to  the  memory  of  an  eye- 
witness (for  where  Mark  and  Luke  can  still  give  the  names  of 
individual  persons  concerned,  such  as  those  of  Jairus  l  and  of 
Bartimeus,2  Matthew  contents  himself  with  a  colourless  '  a 
centurion,'  '  two  blind  men  ') — lastly,  it  would  be  so  unnatural 
that  the  narrator  should  have  withdrawn  himself  so  com- 
pletely from  the  circle  of  characters  moving  through  the 
Gospel — no  '  I '  or  '  we  ! ' — that  we  cannot  believe  this  book 
to  have  been  the  work  of  a  disciple. 

Does  this  result,  however,  deprive  the  Papias  tradition  of 
all  its  value  ?  I  think  not.  Hebrew  speech  and  imperfect 
translation  may  have  been  invention  with  a  purpose  by  the 
Presbyter,  but  all  the  more  firmly  does  the  name  of 
Matthew  cling  to  this  Gospel ;  the  Presbyter  found  it  already 
existing  there,  and  did  not  venture  to  make  any  attack 
upon  this  older  tradition.  It  is  true  that  this  tradition 
itself  may  be  founded  on  error,  but  anyone  who  was  enthu- 
siastic enough  to  seek  an  Apostolic  label  for  an  anonymous 
Gospel  circulating  in  the  first  century — for  we  must  be  pre- 
pared to  go  back  as  far  as  that — would  scarcely  have  hit  upon 
the  name  of  an  Apostle  so  little  known  as  Matthew  with- 
out definite  cause.  He  would  have  been  far  more  likely  to 
ascribe  it  to  Peter  in  view  of  the  brilliant  role  assigned  to  him 

1  Mark  v.  22  ;  Luke  viii.  11.  -  Mark  x.  111. 


§  -25.]  THE   GOSPEL   ACCORDING   TO    MATTIIKW  307 

in  xvi.  18  fol.  and  xvii.  24-27.  All  existing  facts,  including 
the  interest  shown  by  the  author  in  Matthew  in  ix.  9  and  x.  3, 
are  best  explained  on  the  supposition  that  peculiar  relations 
existed  between  this  Gospel  and  Matthew,  that  the  author 
actually  used  a  collection  of  Logia  made  by  Matthew  as  the 
foundation  for  his  book,  and  that  since  he  had  not  his  own 
personal  glory  so  much  at  heart  as  the  influence  of  his  Gospel, 
he  recommended  this  latter  to  his  fellow-believers  as  a  Greek 
version,  made  according  to  his  ability,  of  the  old  Matthew.  If 
Papias's  Presbyter  knew,  on  the  one  hand,  of  the  existence  of  a 
Hebrew  collection  of  Logia  with  Matthew  for  author,  and,  on 
the  other,  had  learnt  to  regard  our  first  Greek  Gospel  as  the 
Gospel  of  Matthew,  the  combination  mentioned  by  Eusebius 
would  have  been  the  most  natural  thing  in  the  world  to  him, 
who  had  probably  never  read  the  Hebrew  text,  and  in  any  case 
believed  that  he  possessed  a  higher  and  more  spiritual  tradi- 
tion than  either  Peter  or  Matthew.  However  uncritical  it  may 
be,  then,  to  insist,  in  defiance  of  all  appearances  and  solely  on 
the  testimony  of  Papias,  upon  an  original  Hebrew  Matthew,  it 
is  no  less  reasonable  and  safe  to  recognise  a  Hebrew  collection 
of  Logia  made  by  Matthew  as  one  of  the  chief  constituents  of 
this  Gospel — provided,  indeed,  that  when  we  come  to  examine 
the  Synoptic  authorities  we  are  led  by  a  quite  independent  road 
to  admit  the  existence  of  Hebrew  Logia  of  Apostolic  origin. 
The  danger  of  ranging  the  iWo-ros-hermeneutist,  with  his  some- 
times inadequate  Buvarov,  too  close  to  the  disciple  Matthew 
cannot  exist  for  us,  unless  we  wish  to  prove  ourselves  a/jLiKpo- 
rspoi  rbv  vovv  than  the  literary  historians,  in  dealing  with 
Eusebius  iii.  39. 

2.  Since  we  must  derive  all  our  knowledge,  except  the 
name  by  which  it  was  known  in  the  Church,  from  the  Gospel 
itself,  we  shall  first  try  to  determine  the  date  of  its  composi- 
tion, of  which  the  ancient  world  knew  nothing.  Here  we 
cannot  take  the  comparatively  numerous  passages  into  account 
in  which  the  Holy  City  is  assumed  to  be  still  untouched  and 
the  service  of  the  Temple  still  continuing.  These  are  all 
sayings  of  Jesus  himself,  which  the  author  reproduces  faith- 
fully according  to  his  documents.  The  remarkable  ev0sa» 
too  of  verse  xxiv.  29,  which  appears  to  place  the  Last  Day  in 

x  2 


308         AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  i. 

close  proximity  to  the  destruction  of  Jerusalem,  springs  in  like 
manner  from  an  older  authority  and  cannot  be  taken  as 
evidence  of  the  date  of  Matthew.  If  the  catastrophe  of 
Jerusalem  really  vibrates  more  powerfully  through  this  Gospel 
than  through  any  of  the  others,  this  does  not  prove  that  its 
author  was  writing  in  the  first  decade  after  70  (as  Harnack 
contends),  but  at  most  that  it  was  more  important  for  his 
purpose  than  for  that  of  the  other  Evangelists  to  lay  special 
stress  upon  that  catastrophe.  That  Matthew  was  composed 
after  the  year  70  is  conclusively  proved  by  verse  xxii.  7 ;  for 
there  the  touch  that  accords  so  ill  with  the  rest  of  the  parable 
of  the  wedding-feast  —the  sending  out  of  his  armies  by  the 
king,  roused  to  wrath  by  the  neglect  of  his  invitations,  to 
*  destroy  those  murderers  and  burn  their  city  ' — could  scarcely 
have  been  thought  of  before  the  burning  of  Jerusalem.  The 
expressions  in  two  of  the  parables,  '  my  Lord  tarries  ' l  and 
'  but  because  the  bridegroom  tarried,' 2  show  that  men  were 
already  feeling  that  they  must  seriously  face  the  question  of 
the  long  delay  of  the  Parusia,  and  vv.  xxvii.  8  and  xxviii.  15 
— '  until  this  day ' — support  the  impression  that  the  narrator 
feels  himself  separated  by  wide  tracts  of  time  from  the  events 
he  narrates.  If  the  external  evidence  forbids  us  to  go  further 
than  the  beginning  of  the  second  century,  other  considerations 
make  it  practically  impossible  to  urge  an  earlier  date  ;  the 
time  about  the  year  100  is  the  most  probable.  The  general 
condition  of  the  Church  favours  this  assumption  ;  she  had 
become,  on  the  one  hand,  a  Church  Universal,  for  we  hear  that 
the  Risen  One  has  promised  her  the  whole  of  mankind— 
'  make  disciples  of  all  nations,'  '  lo,  I  am  with  you  alway,  even 
unto  the  end  of  the  world '  ;  (in  order  to  weigh  this  utterance 
truly,  we  need  but  compare  verse  xi.  23)  ;  on  the  other,  she 
sees  her  very  existence  threatened  by  the  hatred  of  the  powers 
of  this  world.4  The  writer  is  especially  concerned  not  to  give 
any  provocation  to  the  Eoman  authorities,5  and  it  is  not  with- 
out design  that  he  draws  Pilate  and  his  wife  (who  is  well- 
disposed  towards  Jesus)  in  so  favourable  a  light.6  Since  the 
later  years  of  Domitian's  reign,7  Christianity  had  had  every 

1  xxiv.  48.  *  xxv.  ;•>.  :!  xxviii.  18-20.  '  x.  17  fol. 

4  xvii.  27.  "  xxvii.  11-24  and  ob.  ;  See  pp.  2 12 


§  25.]  THE    GOSPEL    ACCORDING    TO    MATTHEW  309 

reason  to  assert  its  political  harmlessness,  and  if  possible  to  call 
up  political  personages  of  the  past  to  bear  witness  to  the  fact. 

But  the  decisive  argument,  in  my  opinion,  is  the  religious 
attitude  of  Matthew.  Though  its  author  is  so  conservative  in 
his  treatment  of  the  tradition,  he  is  already  far  enough 
removed  from  it  in  spirit ;  he  writes  a  Catholic  Gospel,  and  his 
truly  Catholic  temper  gained  for  his  work  the  first  place 
among  the  Gospels.  A  Christian  who  could  summarise  the  task 
of  the  Christian  missionaries  in  the  words  '  baptise  them  .  .  . 
and  teach  them  to  observe  all  things  whatsoever  I  commanded 
you,' l  who  is  already  familiar  with  a  baptismal  formula 
expressed  in  precise  Trinitarian  terms,2  can  scarcely  belong  to 
the  first  century.  Christianity,  indeed,  as  is  finely  shown 
especially  in  xxv.  31-46,  is  still,  properly,  only  perfect 
righteousness,  the  school  of  goodness  and  self-sacrifice,  the 
community  which  accepts  the  new  law  given  by  Jesus — for 
the  ethical  interest  prevails  throughout  over  the  dogmatic— 
but  such  a  community  needs  a  firm  organisation  and  a  clear 
code  of  laws,  such  as  we  find  in  xvi.  18  fol.  and  xviii.  15-17. 
In  Matthew's  eyes  the  community,  the  Church,  forms  the 
highest  disciplinary  authority,  and  is  the  keeper  of  all 
heavenly  gifts  of  grace ;  here,  in  fact,  we  find  the  primitive 
Catholicism  already  complete  in  its  fundamental  features.  It 
was  the  strangest  mistake  that  criticism  could  commit^  to 
place  this  essentially  Catholic  Gospel  first  among  all  the 
evangelistic  products  of  the  early  Church.  The  partisans  of 
tradition  might  be  forgiven  for  it,  for  to  them  the  most 
precious  is  always  the  oldest ;  but  in  defence  of  criticism  it 
can  only  be  urged  that  even  at  the  present  day  there  are 
many  to  whom  a  slight  tinge  of  Jewish  colour  counts  as  a  sure 
sign  of  pre-Catholic  origin,  and  that  Hellenisation  is  pro- 
claimed far  too  one-sidedly  as  the  one  cardinal  point  of  distinc- 
tion between  primitive  Christian  and  early  Catholic  theology. 

3.  Who  the  author  was  and  to  what  province  he  belonged 
will  probably  never  be  known.  The  only  certain  thing  is  that 
he  wrote  for  Greek  readers  who  knew  no  Hebrew,  for  he 
translates  Hebrew  words  to  them.  For  instance,  as  early 

1  xxviii.  19  fol. 

2  In  the  name  of  the  Father  and  of  the  Son  and  of  the  Holy  Ghost. 


310        AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  i. 

as  i.  23,  we  have  'Emanuel,  that  is,  God  with  us.'  From 
his  knowledge  of  the  Hebrew  language  and  Bible  we 
may  conclude  that  he  was  himself  a  born  Jew.  He  is 
intimately  acquainted  with  the  Old  Testament,  and  expounds 
it  in  the  manner  of  the  Palestinian  scribes,  without  using  the 
Alexandrian  method.  That  in  his  book.quotations  from,  or  at 
any  rate  references  to,  the  Old  Testament  occur  much  more 
frequently  than  in  those  of  the  other  Evangelists — we  naturally 
do  not  include  here  the  quotations  in  Jesus'  own  discourses — 
is  no  mere  coincidence ;  it  hangs  together  with  the  funda- 
mental tendency  of  his  work,  revealed  as  early  as  i.  22 — 
*  all  this  is  come  to  pass  that  it  might  be  fulfilled  which  was 
spoken  by  the  prophet.' 1  Such  expressions  occur  through- 
out the  whole  Gospel.2  Besides  the  main  purpose  common  to 
all  the  Evangelists,3  it  is  evident  that  the  author  had  in  view 
the  special  purpose  of  showing,  at  every  important  point  in 
his  narrative,  how  the  prophecies  of  holy  Scripture  had  been 
fulfilled.  How  obviously  has  the  account  of  the  entry  into 
Jerusalem 4  been  shaped  to  fit  this  point  of  view  !  Jesus  asks 
for  two  animals,  '  an  ass  and  a  colt  tied  with  her,'  simply  in 
order  to  suit  Zechariah  ix.  9.  The  object  of  Matthew  is,  as  it 
were,  to  wrest  the  Old  Testament  from  unbelieving  Israel  and 
hold  it  up  as  the  patron  of  the  Christian  faith.  Our  author 
did  not,  of  course,  stand  alone  in  the  Church  of  his  day  in  pur- 
suing such  an  object,  and  thus  stories  like  that  of  the  murder 
of  the  Innocents,  which  seem  to  have  been  invented  merely  for 
the  purpose  of  reproducing  Old  Testament  types  in  the  history 
of  the  fulfilment,  were  not  necessarily  first  imagined  by  him. 
It  was  the  first  duty  of  Christian  theology  to  find  out  Old 
Testament  prophecies  according  to  which  the  Messiah  must 
suffer  and  die,  and  this  task  was  begun  even  before  the  con- 
version of  Paul.  The  second  would  then  naturally  follow — 
that  of  collecting  together  the  remaining  prophecies  concerning 
Christ  and  demonstrating  their  conformity  with  the  actual 
history  of  Jesus.  Here  it  would  of  course  be  all-important  to 
refute  the  calumnies  of  the  Jews  against  Jesus  and  their  attacks 
upon  his  Messiahship,  by  the  words  of  Scripture ;  hence  we 

1  Is.  vii.  14.  -  Note  verses  5,  15,  17,  23  in  chapter  ii.  ;ii<>ne.  • 

8  See  §  23,  3.  4  xxi.  1-11. 


§  25.]  Till-:    (JOSI'KL    A<roHI»l\<!    TO    MATTHEW  311 

have  xxvi.  15  and  xxvii.  9  in  justification  of  the  Judas  episode  • 
— Zechariah  had  foretold  it  all,  down  to  the  very  details.  An 
enormous  amount  of  work  of  this  kind  had  been  done  before 
the  appearance  of  Matthew,  and  we  are  not  in  a  position  to 
decide  which  are  his  own  discoveries  and  where  he  is  depen- 
dent on  others.  At  any  rate  the  selection  of  them  was  his 
own  affair,  and  thus  we  may  at  once  regard  as  typical  of 
Matthew's  taste  the  genealogy  of  Jesus.1  Here  the  three 
series  each  containing  fourteen  generations  (from  Abraham  to 
David,  from  David  to  the  Babylonian  Captivity,  from  the 
latter  to  Jesus)  all  arranged  by  dint  of  a  clumsy  forcing  of  the  ' 
Old  Testament  data— are  obviously  meant  to  make  the  reader 
feel  that  the  whole  line  has  now  found  its  consummation,  and 
that  the  Seed  of  Abraham,  the  Son  of  David,  must  needs 
make  his  appearance  now  for  the  salvation  of  all  peoples, 
whereas  fourteen  generations  earlier,  calamity  and  curse  had 
reached  their  highest  point. 

Nothing  is,  however,  more  mistaken  than  to  regard  the 
Jewish  Christian  who  clung  to  the  Old  Testament  as  a  bigoted 
Israelite  and  an  anti-Pauline.  The  wicked  man  of  the 
parable2  who  sows  tares  at  night  among  the  wheat  has 
been  identified  with  Paul,  but  Matthew  himself  identifies  him 
with  the  devil.3  At  first  sight  it  might  be  tempting  to  inter- 
pret the  prediction  of  false  prophets  and  of  increasing  law- 
lessness (avofiia)  among  the  faithful 4  as  directed  against 
the  law-freed  Paulinism.  But  did  not  Paul  himself  predict 
with  horror  the  revelation  of  the  '  lawless  one  '  ?  5  It  is  true 
that  the  Gospel  contains  words  that  have  in  them  very  little 
of  the  Pauline  spirit,  such  as  '  Go  not  into  any  way  of  the  ^ 
Gentiles,'6  and  still  more  the  dwelling  on  the  eternal  con- 
tinuance of  every  letter  of  the  Law  in  v.  17-19.  In  Matt.  ' 
xxiv.  20  Jesus  bids  his  disciples  pray  that  their  flight  be  not 
'  in  the  winter,  neither  on  a  Sabbath  ' 7  (^Ss  o-a/Bffdray — 
possibly  meaning  the  '  Sabbatical  year  '?),  whereas  Mark  fears 
the  winter  only.  Matt.  xvi.  17-19  seem  to  be  intended  for  the 
sole  purpose  of  proclaiming  Peter  as  the  representative  of  Christ 

1  i.  1-17.          2  xiii.  25-28.  3  xiii.  39.  4  xxiv.  11  fol. 

5  2.  Thess.  ii.  8.  6  x.  5,  6  (xv.  24). 

7  xxiv.  20 ;  cf .  Mark  xiii.  18. 


312        AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  i. 

on  earth,  and  of  denying  the  right  of  any  co-ordinate  authority 
—such  as  that  of  Paul — beside  his  own,  within  the  Church  ; 
but  the  same  writer,  alone  of  all  the  Evangelists,  had  inserted 
in  the  story  of  Jesus  walking  on  the  sea  '  an  episode  which 
exposes  Peter's  want  of  faith  as  clearly  as  that  of  chap,  xxvi.2 
exposes  his  cowardice  during  Jesus'  trial.  Are  we  to  suppose 
that  the  severe  *  Wherefore  didst  thou  doubt  ?  '  of  xiv.  31  is 
spoken— through  the  lips  of  Jesus — by  the  Paul  of  Galatians  ii. 
11  ?  Assuredly  not,  for  the  anecdote  is  merely  meant  to  show 
that  the  faith  of  a  true  disciple  must  be  able  to  compass  all  the 
miracles  performed  by  Christ  himself.  But  if  the  anti-Petrine 
bias  is  a  delusion  here,  the  Petrine  or  Jewish-Christian  bias  is 
no  less  so  in  xvi.  17-19  and,  more  especially,  in  xvii.  24-27  ;  in 
this  latter  passage  Peter  merely  represents  the  whole  class  of 
free  sons  of  God  created  by  Christ,  while  the  words  of  the 
former — whatever  meaning  may  have  attached  to  them  in  the 
first  instance — cannot  have  been  meant  by  the  Evangelist,  who 
wrote  long  after  Peter's  death,  as  a  distinction  conferred  upon 
Peter  alone  :  in  his  eyes  Peter  stood  for  the  Apostolate,  for  the 
Apostolic  Church. 

In  chap,  xxvii.,  moreover,  we  might  almost  detect  a  trace 
of  anti-Jewish  feeling  in  Matthew ;  the  Gentile  Pilate  is 
represented  as  washing  his  hands  in  innocence  of  the  deed, 
while  all  the  people  cry  out :  '  His  blood  be  on  us,  and  on  our 
children  ! ' 3  Matthew  takes  pains,  in  fact,  to  represent  the 
High  Priest  and  the  o^Xos  as  those  who  were  breathing 
slaughter  against  Jesus.  Finally,  against  the  utterances  on 
the  side  of  the  Law  we  must  set  others  that  not  only  attack 
Pharisaism  and  all  its  piety  of  word  and  formula  in  the 
sharpest  way,  but  were  also  never  written  or  spoken  by  a 
legally  strict  Israelite  ;  of  these  we  may  mention  the  sum- 
ming up  of  the  whole  of  the  Old  Testament  in  the  twofold 
commandment  concerning  the  love  of  God  and  the  love  of 
one's  neighbour/  and  the  saying  '  All  things  therefore  what- 
soever ye  would  that  men  should  do  unto  you,  even  so  do  ye 
also  unto  them  ;  for  this  is  the  law  and  the  prophets.' 5  Such 
contradictions  in  the  same  Gospel  are  nothing  exceptional : 

1  xiv.  28-32.  -  Cf.  Mark.  xiv.  s  Verses  24-2G. 

4  xxii.  34-40.  5  vii.  12. 


§  25.]  THE   GOSPEL    ACCORDING   TO    MATTIIKW  313 

for  instance,  the  warning  against  the  teaching  of  the  Pharisees 
in  xvi.  12  scarcely  agrees  with  xxiii.  3,  *  all  things  therefore 
whatsoever  they  bid  you,  these  do  and  observe' — a  command 
which  seems  to  be  already  revoked  in  xxiii.  4,  particularly  in 
connection  with  xi.  29  fol.  Later  writers  misunderstood  indi- 
vidual sayings  of  Jesus  ;  and  moreover  in  different  circum- 
stances and  from  different  points  of  view  Jesus  expressed 
himself  differently  about  the  same  matter.  In  following  his 
authorities,  Matthew  incorporated  sayings  of  a  strongly  con- 
servative stamp  without  difficulty,  because  to  him  it  seemed 
obvious  that,  rightly  explained,  each  of  these  sayings  agreed 
perfectly  with  his  Christianity.  But  wherever  his  own 
hand  shows  itself,  one  sees  that  his  method  of  thought  is 
as  universalistic  as  it  is  free  from  the  bondage  of  the  Law. 
In  the  parable  of  the  marriage  feast '  he  sees  the  rejection 
of  the  unbelieving  Israelites  and  the  calling  of  the  Gentiles, 
and  the  law  on  the  fulfilment  of  which  everything  depends, 
is  not  for  him  the  Jewish  ritual  law,  but  the  moral  law, 
which  the  teaching  of  Jesus  first  led  men  to  understand  in  all 
its  fulness. 

Nor  is  the  righteousness  which  he  prizes  so  highly  that  of 
which  the  Pharisee  boasts  in  the  parable,2  but  rather  that 
which  was  to  be  won  by  obedience  to  the  commandments  of 
Christ,  and  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  is  intended  to  impart 
the  principal  substance  of  this  Christian  code.  The  Evangelist 
looks  upon  v.  17-19  merely  as  confirming  the  agreement 
between  the  old  revelation  and  the  new ;  he  represents  Jesus 
not  as  the  depredator  of  duty  and  service,  but  as  the  teacher 
who  first  showed  men  how  to  understand  the  Law  and  the 
Prophets  in  all  their  profundity  and  gigantic  scope.  The 
ceremonial  ordinances  do  not  enter  into  his  thoughts :  they 
have  already  disappeared  from  his  horizon ;  and  thus  the 
sayings  of  v.  17  etc.  present  no  difficulties  to  him. 

Of  course  the  Saviour  was  not  the  destroyer  but  the 
fulfiller  of  the  Old  Testament,  both  in  his  works  and  in  his 
teaching  (but,  of  the  Law  and  the  Prophets,  be  it  observed) ; 
it  is  to  prove  this  that  the  First  Evangelist  writes  his  Gospel ; 
nevertheless,  for  the  believer  there  can  be  no  other  authority 

1  xxii.  1-14.  2  Luke  xviii.  9  fol. 


314        AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  I. 

than  Jesus  himself.1  There  are  no  specifically  Pauline 
formulae  in  Matthew,  but  still  less  are  there  traces  of  any 
animosity  against  Paul.  The  writer  has  no  part  in  the 
strifes  of  the  Apostolic  age,  and  to  put  him  down  as  belonging 
to  one  or  other  of  its  parties  is  a  fundamental  mistake.  He 
represents  the  standpoint,  not  of  Paul,  nor  of  Peter,  nor  of 
Apollos,  nor  of  the  Corinthian  '  men  of  Christ,'  but  of  the 
Church,  the  building  of  which  he  alone  foretells  in  the  trium- 
phant words  of  xvi.  18.  It  is  no  mere  chance  that  those 
Judaists  who  separated  themselves  from  the  Catholic  Church 
were  not  satisfied  with  this  Gospel.  And,  indeed,  it  would  have 
been  the  strangest  irony  of  history  if  a  Gospel  of  Judaising 
or  Essenising  tendency  had  so  quickly  conquered  the  hearts  of 
all  Gentile  Christians  as  to  remain  to  this  day  the  principal 
Gospel  of  Christendom,  the  Gospel  by  which  the  picture  of 
Jesus  has  been  engraved  on  all  our  minds  !  Certainly  Matthew 
has  come  to  be  the  most  important  book  ever  written,  but  not 
through  any  misunderstanding  or  because  of  any  mere  advan- 
tages of  form.  It  has  exerted  its  enormous  influence  upon  the 
Church  because  it  was  written  by  a  man  who  bore  within 
him  the  spirit  of  the  growing  Church  Universal,  and  who,  free 
from  all  party  interests,  knew  how  to  write  a  Catholic  Gospel : 
that  is  to  say,  a  Gospel  destined  and  fitted  for  all  manner  of 
believers. 

4.  Much,  indeed,  in  the  individuality  of  Matthew  has 
favoured  this  triumphal  progress  of  the  First  Gospel.  Leav- 
ing out  of  account  the  beginning  and  end,  it  is  richer  in 
material  even  than  Luke.  The  ingenious  system  by  which 
the  writer  has  made  use  of  the  numbers  3,  7,  10  or  12  for 
grouping  together  sections  related  either  in  matter  or  form, 
has  remained  for  the  most  part  unnoticed ;  on  the  other  hand, 
his  love  for  making  long  and  homogeneous  compilations,  like 
the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  which  he  has  put  together  out  of 
all  kinds  of  disjointed  material,  like  the  chapter  of  the  seven 
parables,2  the  discourse  at  the  sending  forth  of  the  disciples,-'5 
.  the  declaration  of  Woe,4  the  discourse  on  the  last  things,5  as 
well  as  the  section  about  the  miracles  of  Jesus  fi— all  these 

1  xxviii.  10.  -  xiii.  3  Chap.  x.  4  Chap,  xxiii. 

5  Chaps,  xxiv.  and  xxv.  B  Chaps,  viii.  and  ix. 


§  25.]  T1IK    GOSPEL    ACCORDING   TO   MATTHEW  315 

have  won  him  the  gratitude  of  those  who  care  more  for  an 
arrangement  calculated  to  aid  the  memory  than  for  chrono- 
logical accuracy.  In  telling  his  story  Matthew  hits  the 
happy  mean  between  circumstantial  prolixity  and  obscure 
terseness ;  he  is  easy  to  read,  for  the  reader's  attention 
is  never  diverted  from  the  matter  in  hand  by  anything 
artificial  or  striking  in  his  form.  The  Hebrew  colouring 
which  comes  out  so  abundantly  (though  not  only,  it  is  true, 
in  this  Gospel)  in  the  many  pleonasms  like  '  and  it  came  to 
pass,  that,' l  '  and  he  answered  and  spake '  (esp.  \sywv  after  a 
verbum  dicendi),  or  in  the  placing  of  the  predicate  before 
the  subject 2 ;  and  the  preference  (peculiar  to  Matthew)  for 
connecting  the  different  sections  with  '  after  these  things '  and 
'  in  that  time,'  ;  are  admirably  suited  to  the  quiet,  even  tone  in 
which  the  common  folk  like  to  have  such  stories  told.  However 
many  written  sources  Matthew  may  have  borrowed  from,  we 
must  acknowledge,  even  without  comparing  them,  that  he  has 
not  made  himself  their  slave,  but  has  used  them  with  absolute 
freedom,  assimilating  them  as  he  thinks  best.  The  individuality 
of  the  author  makes  itself  so  strongly  felt  from  beginning  to 
end  both  in  style  and  tendency,  in  cadence  and  thought,  that  it 
is  impossible  to  think  of  the  Gospel  as  a  mere  compilation. 

5.  The  integrity  of  Matthew  has  recently  been  disputed, 
generally  with  the  object  of  weeding  out  later  and,  as  it  is 
said,  interested  interpolations  made  in  the  genuine  '  Matthew,' 
or  even  with  that  of  distinguishing  a  later  '  editor  '  from  the 
earlier  compiler,  a  deutero-  from  a  proto-Matthew.  The  most 
vigorous  champion  of  this  latter  view  is  Soltau.  Harnack 
considers  it  an  obvious  fact  that  xxviii.  9  and  10  form  a 
simple  duplicate  of  xxviii.  5-7,  due  to  the  desire  to  fit  an 
appearance  at  Jerusalem  into  the  Gospel,  but  he  also  has  his 
suspicions  concerning  the  birth-story,  the  confession  of  Peter 
and  the  organisation  of  the  Christian  community.  Soltau 
ascribes  the  following  additions  to  the  later  supplementer : 
chaps,  i.  and  ii. :  all  illustrative  quotations,  such  as  vv. 
iii.  3,  iv.  14-10,  etc. ;  those  paragraphs  which  depend  upon  the 

1  E.g.,  vii.  28,  xxvi.  1. 

2  For  instance,  Ae^et  avr£  6  'l-rjaovs,  xviii.  22  ; 
\eyovffai,  xxv.  9.  3  Tore,  cv 


316        AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  i. 

arguments  of  such  quotations,  such  as  xxvi.  15,  the  stories  of 
the  ass  and  the  colt l  and  of  Judas,2  and  also  v.  18  fol. 
because  this  latter  represents  the  fundamental  principle  of 
illustrative  quotation  ;  Matthew's  three  Petrine  legends,3  and, 
in  the  story  of  the  Passion,  xxvii.  19,  24  fol.,  52  fol.,  the 
passage  from  xxvii.  62  to  xxviii.  20.  and  a  few  isolated  expres- 
sions recalling  passages  in  the  Old  Testament.  Soltau 
defends  this  hypothesis  on  the  grounds  that  the  contrast  in 
language  between  the  additions  and  the  rest  of  the  Gospel, 
and  also  in  style  between  the  discourses  and  the  more  con- 
siderable additions,  demand  a  difference  of  author ;  that  the 
interpolations  generally  disturb  and  interrupt  the  context, 
whereas  as  a  rule  Matthew  impresses  us  with  its  uniformity 
of  structure,  and  finally  that  the  original  Matthew  was  anti- 
Judaistic  and  undogmatic  in  his  opinions,  while  on  the  other 
hand  the  Judaistic  supplementer  maintained  a  strictly  dog- 
matic point  of  view.  These  observations  all  contain  an 
element  of  truth,  and  only  the  second  is  somewhat  wrongly 
stated  ;  these  '  additions '  are  Sevrepwo-sis,  later  accretions, 
which  it  was  beyond  the  skill  of  the  Evangelist  to  weld  into  a 
perfect  whole  with  the  original  substance  of  the  Gospel 
matter  ;  but  must  we  therefore  assume  that  they  were  inter- 
polated as  afterthoughts  into  the  finished  Gospel  ?  This 
hypothesis  would  moreover  leave  but  a  sorry  patchwork  task 
to  the  Proto-Matthew,  and  ascribes  everything  with  any 
independent  stamp  upon  it  to  his  later  amplifier.  In  reality 
we  are  never  forced  by  our  First  Gospel  to  assume  the  exis- 
tence of  two  different  editors  -  apart,  of  course,  from  those 
portions  in  which  the  writer's  authorities  are  distinctly 
traceable  ;— it  presents  a  whole,  proceeding  from  a  single  mind, 
as  far  at  least  as  a  truly  Catholic  Christian  of  the  year  100  or 
thereabouts  could  create  a  whole  out  of  such  materials.  The 
theory  of  the  Deutero-Matthew  was,  in  fact,  only  brought 
forward  to  make  the  criticism  of  the  Synoptics  easier,  for 
certain  writers  wished  to  assert  both  the  dependence  of  Luke 
on  Matthew  and  his  priority  before  Matthew.  If  this  is 
established,  we  must  look  upon  Matthew  as  a  hybrid  produc- 
tion ;  but  on  this  point  we  would  refer  our  readers  to  §§  28  and 

.  2-5.  -  xxvii.  :J   10.  3  Chaps,  xiv.  xvi.  and  \\ii. 


§  25.]  THE    GOSPEL    ACCORDING   TO    MATTHEW  317 

29.  The  hybridity  of  Matthew,  which  is  in  a  sense  shared  by 
Luke,  is  to  be  explained  by  the  facts  of  religious  and  tradi- 
tional developments,  not  by  hypotheses  of  literary  history 
alone.  Under  the  circumstances,  therefore,  the  mere  fact  that 
we  find  older  and  newer  material  intermingled  in  his  book  does 
not  justify  us  in  dividing  the  First  Evangelist  (the  beginning 
and  end  of  whose  work  correspond  so  well  together)  into 
two  persons,  of  one  of  whom  we  could  form  no  conception. 
Deutero-Matthew,  moreover,  must  have  expunged  large  sections 
of  Proto-Matthew's  work,  especially  his  ending  :  why  not,  then, 
have  corrected  it  ? 

§  26.  The  Gospel  according  to  Mark 

[Of.  works  mentioned  in  §§  23  and  24.  Besides  these, 
H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  i.  2,  1892,  by  B.  and  J.  Weiss;  'International 
Critical  Commentary '  (1896),  by  E.  Gould,  and  P.  Schanz's  work 
mentioned  in  §  25.  A.  Klostermann's  '  Das  Marcusevangelium 
nach  seinem  Quellenwerthe  fur  die  evangelische  Geschichte  '  (1867) 
is  a  defence  in  the  apologetic  interest,  in  parts  full  of  caprice,  of 
the  priority  of  Matthew  to  Mark,  but  in  wealth  of  material  and  in 
sterling  quality  it  has  not  been  equalled  by  any  later  work,  and  cer- 
tainly not  surpassed  by  that  of  W.  Hadorn,  '  Die  Entstehung  des 
Marcusevangelium '  (1898).  For  par.  5  (end)  see  Conybeare's  article 
in  the  'Expositor  '  for  1893,  entitled  '  Aristion,  the  author  of  the  last 
12  verses  of  Mark  '  (p.  241) ;  P.  Kohrbach's  '  Der  Schluss  des  Mar- 
cusevangelium, der  Vierevangelienkanon  und  der  kleinasiatische 
Presbyter,'  (1894) ;  Adolf  Harnackin  '  Texte  und  Untersuchungen  ' 
(1894),  xii.  1  6,  p.  6,  and  also  his  '  Chronologic,'  vol  i.  pp.  696  fol.J 

1.  As  regards  the  early  evidences  for  Mark,  the  state 
of  the  case  is  precisely  as  with  those  for  Matthew.  They 
go  back  to  Papias,1  who  had  heard  from  the  'Presbyter '  that 
Mark  had  been  Peter's  interpreter,  and  had  noted  down  the 
sayings  and  doings  of  Jesus  accurately,  as  far  as  his  memory 
served  him,  but  not  in  the  right  order.2  The  want  of  order 
he  excuses  by  saying  that  Mark  himself  was  never  a  hearer  or 
follower  of  the  Lord,  but  derived  all  his  knowledge  from  the 
discourses  of  Peter,  which  in  their  turn  were  always  adapted 
to  the  needs  of  the  moment,  so  that  they  could  not  be  called 

1  Eusebius,  Hist.  Eccles.  iii.  39,  15  ;  see  §  25,  1. 


318        AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  i. 

a  compilation  of  the  words  of  the  Lord.  Mark,  therefore,  was 
not  at  all  in  a  position  to  arrange  them  in  the  right  order 
and  to  produce  a  complete  Gospel ;  he  rightly  attached 
the  greatest  importance  to  omitting  nothing  and  falsify- 
ing nothing  in  what  he  had  heard.  How  far  Papias,  who 
measures  Mark  by  the  standard  of  another  Gospel  (probably 
that  of  John  ')  and  who  thinks  himself  obliged  to  excuse 
his  deficiencies,  is  here  mingling  his  own  reflections  with 
the  naturally  shorter  account  given  by  the  Presbyter,  is  no 
business  of  ours  to  decide ;  the  statement  concerning  the 
authorship  of  Mark  is  certainly  the  oldest  kernel  of  the  story, 
and  we  who  recognised  a  sound  kernel  in  the  parallel  state- 
ment concerning  Matthew,  certainly  have  no  cause  to  reject  it 
here  without  a  hearing.  The  First  Epistle  of  Peter  also 
assumes  the  presence  of  a  Mark  in  the  following  of  Peter.2 
Col.  iv.  10,  where  '  Mark,  the  cousin  of  Barnabas,'  is  men- 
tioned as  the  companion  of  Paul,3  makes  us  think  of  '  John 
Mark '  in  the  Acts,1  whose  relations  with  Paul  were  not  always 
of  the  best,  and  whom  nothing  could  deter  from  joining  Peter 
later  on.  The  knowledge  of  Greek  and  Hebrew  which  would 
qualify  him  for  the  title  of  interpreter  may  without  hesitation 
be  attributed  to  a  relation  of  Barnabas,  and  the  writer  of  the 
Gospel  possesses  this  knowledge:  he  preserves  Aramaic 
words,  but  translates  them  correctly  into  Greek,  as,  for 
instance,  '  talitha  cumi,  which  is,  being  interpreted,  Maiden, 
I  say  unto  thee,  arise.'  •' 

It  is  true  that  we  shall  have  to  give  a  different  answer 
from  that  given  by  Papias  or  the  Presbyter,  to  the  question 
whether  Mark  arranged  his  material  in  the  chance  order  into 
which  Peter  threw  the  words  and  deeds  of  Jesus  in  his 
teaching.  Papias's  account  of  Mark's  procedure  is,  in  my 
opinion,  psychologically  untenable.  In  reality  Mark  has 
the  best  rafts  of  all  the  Evangelists,  for,  broadly  speaking, 
the  life  of  Jesus  did  unfold  itself  in  the  way  in  which  Mark 
describes  it.  At  first  the  object  of  universal  wonder,  he 
soon  provoked  opposition,  and  by  dint  of  his  successful  efforts 
towards  the  moral  elevation  of  the  people  and  their  liberation 

».  305.         2  1.  Peter  v.  13.         8  Cf.  Philem.  24  ;  2.  Tim.  iv.  11. 
«  Acts  xii.  12,  25,  xv.  37-39.  J  M.-irk  v.  41. 


§  26.]  THE    GOSPEL   ACCORDING   TO    MARK  319 

from  the  yoke  of  the  Pharisees  and  the  tutelage  of  the 
Scribes,  he  drew  down  upon  himself  that  mortal  enmity  of 
the  upper  classes  which  drove  him  gradually  to  withdrawal, 
to  flight,  and  the  limitation  of  his  work  to  a  small  circle  of 
disciples,  until  at  last  the  opportunity  came  for  his  complete 
destruction.  But  Papias's  mistake  is  one  of  judgment  only, 
and  does  not  in  the  least  affect  the  fact  attested  by  him : 
that  John  Mark  wrote  a  Gospel  founded  on  reminiscences  of 
the  Petrine  circle.  The  writer  of  our  Mark  never  pretends 
to  have  been  an  eye-witness.  The  anecdote  told  by  him 
alone,1  of  the  mysterious  young  man  who  followed  Jesus 
after  his  capture,  when  the  disciples  had  already  fled,  and 
then  when  hands  were  laid  on  him,  left  his  fine  linen  cloth, 
and  fled  naked,  can  be  taken,  as  many  wish,  to  refer  to  the 
narrator,  without  the  Mark-hypothesis  being  in  the  least 
endangered  thereby  ;  for  this  young  man,  who  only  appears 
once,  is  not  represented  as  being  an  actual  '  hearer '  of  the 
Lord,  which  Mark  himself  certainly  was  not.  The  proba- 
bility is  that  we  have  in  this  story  a  piece  of  the  very  oldest 
tradition,  just  as  we  have  in  the  saying2  that  Simon  of 
Gyrene,  who  carried  the  cross,  '  was  the  father  of  Alexander 
and  Eufus.'  The  persons  in  question  were  still  known  to 
Mark,  but  the  other  Evangelists  pass  them  over  in  silence, 
because  they  know  nothing  of  them  and  no  religious  interest 
attaches  to  such  statements. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  Peter  is  especially  prominent  in 
this  Gospel.  The  public  ministry  of  Jesus  begins  with  the 
calling  of  Peter  •' ;  and  the  healing  of  his  wife's  mother 4  is  surely 
mentioned  only  because  of  his  own  grateful  remembrance  of 
the  incident.  Exactly  at  the  right  point  in  the  narrative 
Mark  brings  about  the  distinction  between  the  two  names 
Simon  and  Peter  3 ;  later  on 6  a  saying  is  put  into  the  mouth  of 
Peter  (Matthew  attributes  it  to  '  the  disciples  ' 7)  which  could 
perfectly  well  have  been  said  by  any  other  follower.  Still  more 
striking  is  the  way  in  which  Peter  is  expressly  named  beside 
'  his  disciples  '  in  xvi.  7  as  the  recipient  of  the  command  to  go 
before  into  Galilee,  where  the  risen  Lord  would  show  himself. 

1  xiv.  51  fol.  -  xv.  21.  3  i.  16-18.  «  i.  30  fol. 

5  Mark  iii.  16.  (i  x.  28,  xi.  21.  •  Matt.  xxi.  20. 


320        AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  i. 

Nevertheless,  the  Gospel  of  Mark  cannot  be  called  Petrine  in 
the  sense  of  having  been  compiled  at  Peter's  dictation,  or 
as  forming  a  valuable  authority  not  only  for  Peter's  recollec- 
tions of  the   life  and   sufferings  of  Jesus,   but  also  for   the 
Petrine   theology,   and   even    for   the   personality,   tempera- 
ment and  disposition  of  the  Apostle.     It  is  perhaps  possible 
that  Peter  might  not  have  withheld  from  the  knowledge  of 
his  brethren   stories  so   deeply   discreditable   to   himself   as 
that   of  his   denial l   or  that   of   viii.    32   fol.,    where   Jesus 
rebukes  him  as  '  Satan  ' ;  it  is  perhaps  possible  that  many  a 
mythical  feature  may  have  found  its  way  into  his  picture  of 
Jesus,   especially  in  his  story  of  the  last  days,  that  he  was 
capable  of  taking  pleasure  in  miraculous  tales  like  that  of  the 
destruction  of   the  two   thousand    swine,2  and  that   a   half- 
visionary  experience  like  that  of  the  Transfiguration  scene  :s 
may  not  have  been  improbable  in  his  case  ;  but  could  he  have 
related  anything  so  purely  legendary  as  xv.  36,  or  as  the  two 
stories  of  the  feeding  of  the  multitude  ?     If  Papias  had  not 
suggested  the  idea,  in  fact,  we  should  scarcely  have  thought 
of  claiming  Peter  as  the  authority  for  the  statements  made  in 
Mark's  narrative  ;  Mark's  intention  was  to  give  us  the  Gospel, 
not  the  Gospel  according  to  Peter.    He  shows  himself,  besides, 
to   be    so  skilful   a   narrator  and    so   fully   master    of    his 
materials  that  we  should  be  doing  him  an  injustice  in  placing 
him  arbitrarily  in  dependence  on  Peter,  as  the  ancients  wished 
to  do,  out  of  ecclesiastical  considerations.     Nowhere  does  the 
Gospel  suggest  the  idea  that  its  author  was  fettered  by  his 
material ;  all  he  tells  seems  to  come  straight  from  his  heart, 
the  Gospel  he  offers  is  complete  in  itself  : — would  this  have 
been  so  successfully  accomplished  if  he  had  confined  himself 
to  what  he  had  casually  learnt  from  Peter  ?     Moreover,  if  we 
believe  that  Mark  was  using  a  written  document  in  chap,  xiii., 
we  must  by  so  doing  abandon  the  Petrine  foundation. 

No,  Mark  too,  like  Luke,  was  a  collector ;  his  work 
did  not  grow  up  under  the  shadow  of  one  mighty  name 
alone.  A  man  who,  though  a  friend  of  Peter,  had  had 
opportunities,  for  many  decades,  of  hearing  other  reports  from 
other  men  concerning  the  great  age  of  salvation,  must  have 

1  xiv.  30,  66  7-'.  "  Chap.  v.  3  ix.  2  etc. 


§  26.]  T11K    (iOSI'KL    ACCORDING    TO    MAI-IK  321 

written  a  Gospel  different  indeed  from  one  which  Peter  himself 
or  his  simple  interpreter  mi^lil  have  produced. 

2.  All  that  this  Gospel  reveals  concerning  the  theo- 
logical position  of  its  author  agrees  with  the  result  just 
obtained.  Different  critics  have  imputed  the  most  opposite 
tendencies  to  him :  some  declare  that  his  Gospel  is  directly 
Pauline  ;  others,  that  it  breathes  the  purest  Apostolic  tradition  ; 
others,  again,  that  it  is  the  Gospel  of  conscious  neutrality, 
intended  to  effect  a  general  reconciliation,  by  the  avoidance  of 
extreme  utterances  on  either  side,  of  all  parties  on  a  common 
Evangelistic  ground.  All  this,  however,  is  theory  forced  upon 
it  from  outside.  In  the  writer  himself  we  can  trace  no 
tendency  but  that  of  telling  the  Gospel  of  Jesus  Christ  as 
movingly  as  possible,  and  of  demonstrating  his  glory  through 
his  own  words  and  deeds — the  tendency,  in  fact,  which  every 
Gospel  must  display.  The  author  did  not  wish  to  gain  favour 
with  any  particular  creed,  school  or  party.  His  leanings 
towards  Pauline  views,  which  Volkmar  discovered  in  him  in  so 
many  places,1  are  of  just  as  problematic  a  nature  as  the 
contrast  in  which  Mark  is  supposed  to  stand  to  the  anti-Pauline 
Apocalypse  of  John.-  Phrases  that  sometimes  have  a  Pauline 
ring,  like  '  Abba,  Father,' 3  or  the  saying  about  the  fulfilling 
of  the  time,4  need  not — if  we  must  insist  at  all  upon  direct 
authority  for  such  trifles — lead  us  to  doubt  the  authorship  of 
Mark,  for  Mark  certainly  came  under  the  influence  of  Paul. 
But  the  material  which  the  writer  wishes  to  reproduce — and 
to  reproduce  faithfully  and  without  any  subjective  additions 
—had  its  origin  in  the  Primitive  Community,  and  Mark 
would  certainly  not  have  been  the  man  to  Paulinise  it,  or 
to  have  consciously  coloured  it  in  any  way.  From  the  Gospel 
itself  we  derive  but  one  impression  concerning  the  author :  that 
he  was  a  born  Jew,  familiar  with  the  circle  of  the  original 
Apostles,  and  especially  interested  in  Peter,  but  also  a  much- 
travelled  person,  rejoicing  in  the  fact  that  the  Gospel  was  to 
be  preached  to  all  the  nations/' 

The  confession  which  he  puts  into  the  mouth  of  the  Gentile 

1  Cp.  Mark  xiii.  35  with  Eom.  xiii.  12.  2  Mark  xiii.  26  fol. 

3  Only  to  be  found  in  Mark  xiv.  36  ;  Horn.  viii.  15  ;  Gal.  iv.  6. 
1  Mark  i.  15  ;  cf.  Gal.  iv.  4.  5  Mark  xiii.  10. 

Y 


322       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NKW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

centurion  beside  the  Cross,  '  Truly  this  man  was  the  Son  of 
God,'  is  characteristic  of  his  attitude  towards  the  Gentile 
mission.  Judaistic  leanings,  Law-bound  anxieties,  are  both 
outside  his  horizon  ;  in  his  eyes  the  religion  of  the  crucified 
and  risen  Son  of  God  was  a  new  world -religion. 

We  shall  never  know  whether  Mark  originally  wrote  for  a 
limited  circle  of  readers  or  not.  He  certainly  did  not  write 
for  Palestinian  readers,  for  there  would  have  been  no  need  to 
translate  Golgotha  and  other  words  of  the  kind  for  their 
benefit,  and  it  would  have  been  superfluous  to  explain  to  Jewish 
Christians  in  general  the  time-indication  '  the  first  day  of 
unleavened  bread  '  by  the  addition  '  when  they  slew  the 
passover.' J  These  little  parentheses,  however,  cannot  be  ex- 
plained away  as  the  additions  of  a  translator,  for  the  suggestion 
that  there  is  an  original  Hebrew  or  Aramaic  document  at  t 
bottom  of  our  Greek  Gospel  is  conspicuously  ill-judged, 
translator  could  have  created  the  originality  of  language 
shown  by  Mark.  The  tradition,  according  to  one  branch  of 
which  Mark  was  written  in  Alexandria,  while  another  and  con- 
siderably older  branch  assigns  it  to  Kome,  is  here  of  little  use 
to  us  :  the  first  is  the  outcome  of  the  legend  that  Mark  was 
Bishop  of  Alexandria ;  the  second  springs  from  the  remem- 
brance of  Peter's  activity  in  Rome,  and  the  assumption  that 
the  interpreter  must  have  worked  in  the  same  place  as  his 
master  was  then  an  exceedingly  natural  one.  According  to 
Philemon  and  Colossians,  Mark  really  went  to  Rome,  and  it  is 
very  possible  that  he  stayed  there  a  considerable  time,  and 
perhaps  even  that  he  received  the  impulse  to  begin  his  work 
there,  and  stayed  to  complete  it.  The  influence  of  the  Latin 
language  upon  the  Greek  of  Mark's  Gospel  has  been  urged  in 
support  of  this  hypothesis,  which,  however,  still  remains  a 
mere  hypothesis.  Some  Latin  words  he  takes  over  bodily 
(like  \£yea>v,  tcrjvo-of,  Ksvrvpiwv),  and  the  widow's  two  mites  -he 
reckons  in  Roman  coinage — '  which  make  a  quadrans.'  But 
we  must  not  lay  too  much  stress  on  isolated  instances  like 
these,  for  with  the  expansion  of  the  Roman  Empire,  Latin 
terms,  especially  those  connected  with  the  law,  the  army  and 
the  taxes,  would  be  sure  to  make  themselves  used  throughout 

1  Mark  xiv.  12.  -  xii.  42. 


§26.]  TIIK    tiOSPKL    ACCORDING   TO    AIAIIK  323 

the  world.  It  is  therefore  more  than  bold  to  point  to  x.  12 
—which  is  peculiar  to  Mark — as  a  proof  of  the  Koman  origin 
of  the  Gospel.  The  words  '  And  if  she  herself  shall  put  away 
her  husband,  and  marry  another,  she  comrnitteth  adultery,' 
are  certainly  surprising  from  the  lips  of  Jesus,  for  the  divorce 
of  a  husband  by  the  wife  was  unknown  to  the  Jew.  But  are 
we  to  suppose  that  Mark,  the  Jew,  was  here  seeking  to 
accommodate  the  words  of  Jesus  to  the  Roman  marriage-law  ? 
If  so  he  must  either  have  become  accustomed  to  the  ideas  of 
Roman  Law  with  marvellous  rapidity,  or  else  have  developed 
an  incredible  degree  of  subtlety.  A  much  simpler  ex- 
planation is  that  he  made  this  addition — the  wording  of  which 
is  in  any  case  incorrect — to  the  genuine  Logion  of  verse  11 
out  of  a  love  of  parallelism  and  of  symmetry ;  it  seemed 
important  to  him  to  declare  that  in  the  Kingdom  of  God  the 
duties  and  transgressions  of  men  and  women  counted  alike. 

3.  As  to  the  date  at  which  the  Second  Gospel  was  com- 
posed, the  development  of  the  tradition  is  interesting. 
According  to  Irenaeus's  interpretation  of  him,1  Papias  (about 
150  A.D.)  seems  to  imply  that  during  the  composition  of  his 
book  Mark  was  no  longer  able  to  appeal  to  Peter  for  emenda- 
tions or  advice ;  Clement  of  Alexandria,  on  the  other  hand, 
tells  us  -  that  when  Peter  heard  of  Mark's  scheme,  he  neither 
hindered  nor  encouraged  him,  while  Eusebius  himself  main- 
tains 3  (about  325  A.D.),  on  the  authority  of  Clement  of 
Alexandria  and  Papias,  that  by  revelation  of  the  Holy 
Spirit  Peter  had  expressed  himself  well  pleased  that  Mark 
had  been  moved  to  write  a  Gospel,  and  had  verified  (or  cor- 
roborated) the  work  (icvpwo-ai,  rrjv  <ypa<f)r)v).  Post-Eusebian 
theologians  simply  make  Peter  commission  Mark  to  do  the 
work,  taking  the  former  as  the  actual  author,  Mark  merely 
as  the  scribe.  In  this  gradation  the  ideal  of  Apostolicity  is 
realised.  Of  course,  the  older  theory  is  the  more  sensible,  for 
the  true  Apostles  never  had  anything  to  do  with  the  revision  of 
books.  That  consideration  would  not,  however,  prevent  Mark's 
Gospel  from  having  been  written  during  Peter's  lifetime, 
for  Mark  certainly  did  not  hold  a  life  appointment  as  Peter's 
secretary.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  merely  fanciful  to 

1  iii.  1-7.  -  Eusebius,  Hist.  Eccles.  vi.  14,  7.  3  Ibid.  ii.  15,  2. 

T  2 


324      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

suppose  that  there  is  any  special  probability  in  the  assumption 
that  Mark  wrote  down  the  recollections  of  Peter  immediately, 
or  at  any  rate  soon  after  his  death  :  as  a  matter  of  fact  we  are 
thrown  back  upon  the  Gospel  itself  as  our  sole  authority  for 
the  determination  of  its  date.  Well,  then,  the  farewell  speech 
of  chapter  xiii.  certainly  contains  a  few  expressions,  especially 
verse  14,  which  seem  to  belong  to  the  years  before  70,  but  in 
these  cases  Mark  is  undoubtedly  dependent  on  an  older 
source,  while  his  own  point  of  view  is  betrayed  by  vv.  1  fol. 
and  9  fol.  as  that  of  the  later  comer.  The  most  signifi- 
cant fact,  however,  is  that  here  the  last  catastrophe  is 
foretold  for  the  days  '  after  that  tribulation  '  *  without  the 
addition  of  the  '  immediately '  (svOscos'}  so  characteristically 
preserved  by  Matthew 2  and  coming  from  an  earlier  source. 
And  so,  though  we  are  not  at  all  convinced  by  Volkmar's 
positive  dating  of  the  Gospel  at  73  A.D.,  we  should  still 
regard  the  year  70  as  the  terminus  a  quo.  The  lower  limit 
can  in  our  opinion  only  be  found  by  comparison  with  Matthew 
and  Luke,  but  the  fact  that  it  was  in  Mark's  lifetime  confines 
us  to  the  first  century. 

4.  Mark  is  distinguished  by  a  power  of  lively  presentation  ; 
he  aims  at  clearness  and  at  complete  pictorial  reproduction. 
All  through  he  speaks  in  the  language  of  the  people,  without 
any  attempt  at  elegance  or  symmetry.  Hence  we  find  him 
reporting  short  phrases  in  oratio  recta*  running  the  sentences 
together  with  /cat,4  avoiding  the  use  of  the  relative  pronoun,5 
and  using  avros  very  frequently  in  the  oblique  cases.6  His 
style  is  distinguished  by  a  lack  of  connecting  particles 
between  separate  paragraphs,  and  by  a  certain  monotony  in 
the  introductory  forms ;  his  mode  of  presentation  is  in  fact 
typically  anecdotic.  He  avoids  abstract  expressions,  and  woulc 

>  xiii.  24.  -  Matt.  xxiv.  29. 

8  See,  for  example,  Chap.  iii.  11,  and  the  characteristic  direct  question 
xiii.  1,  as  compared  with  Matt.  xxiv.  1  and  Luke  xxi.  ">. 

*  See  iii.  1-26,  where  Kal  is  used  about  thirty  times  for  connecting 
sentences,  8e  only  once,  y&p  twice. 

5  E.g.,  ii.  15  :   '  there   were   many  and   they  followed   him  '  = '  many  wl 
followed  him.' 

8  E.g. :  seven  times  in  Chap.  vii.  32  fol.,  now  of  Jesus,  now  of  the 
and  dumb. 


§  26.]  TITH    (.'OSPKL    ACCORDING    TO    MARK  525 

rather  be  long-winded  than  use  them  '  ;  he  is  not  afraid  of 
vulgarisms  like  Kpaftarros,1*  which  Matthew  and  Luke  always 
replace  by  tc\ivrf  or  some  such  word.  In  Mark  we  find  also  a 
piling  on  of  negatives,  and  the  use  ;  of  such  careless  colloquial- 
isms as  '  they  uncovered  the  roof  where  he  was/  '  He  uses  the 
present  tense  by  preference,  and  likes  paraphrasing  a  preterite 
by  the  phrase  '  and  he  began,'  '  just  as  he  likes  saying  too 
much  rather  than  too  little  for  the  sake  of  greater  vividness. 
Note,  for  instance,  the  superfluous  egopvgavres  in  ii.  4, 
the  phrase  'what  manner  of  stones  and  what  manner  of 
buildings  '  in  xiii.  1,  and  the  explanatory  details  about  the 
time  in  xiii.  35  —  '  whether  at  even,  or  at  midnight,  or  at 
cocker  owing,  or  in  the  morning.'  He  has  an  especial  fond- 
ness for  the  adverb  '  immediately  '  (svdvs)  and  similar 
hyberbolical  turns  of  phrase.  Hence  it  is  that  there  is  some- 
thing fresh  and  strong  and  primitive  about  his  whole  presen- 
tation, particularly  in  its  very  awkwardnesses.  Now  and  then 
his  taste  reminds  us  of  that  displayed  by  an  old  '  reviser  '  of 
Codex  D,'1  in  dealing  with  the  texts  of  the  Gospels,  or  more 
particularly  with  the  Acts  ;  in  many  cases  his  downright, 
pleonastic  mode  of  expression  sounds  like  an  intentional 
strengthening  of  that  of  his  fellow-Evangelists,  with  its  lack 
of  energy  and  nerve,  and  this  perhaps  partly  explains  the 
hypothesis  of  Griesbach  and  Baur,  which  regards  Mark  as  a 
mere  excerptor  from  Matthew  and  Luke.  But  in  reality  his 
naive  freshness  is  a  very  different  product  from  the  reflec- 
tiveness of  a  later  generation,  as  shown  by  these  emendators, 
and  in  the  comparatively  rare  instances  in  which  Codex  D 
strikes  the  true,  primitive  note  of  Mark,  in  its  version  of  the 
Acts,  Matthew  or  Luke,  it  also  is  reproducing  the  genuine, 
earliest  text. 

5.  The  integrity  of  Mark  has  been  the  subject  of  endless 
discussion  among  the  critics.  I  do  not  mean  to  refer  to  the 
excessive  amount  of  early  '  emendation  '  which  gathered  round 
his  text  during  the  first  centuries,  out  of  the  wish  to  bring  it 


1  Cf.  xiii.  19,  cur'  apx^s  uriafcas  fyv  fKrifffv  6  8e6s.  -  ii.  4,  9,  11  fol.,  vi.  55. 

3  See,  for  example,  xiii.  2,  ou  ^  atyeQfj  [o»5e]  \i6os  .  .  .  2»s  ov  ^ 

4  ii.  4.  i  See  i.  45,  '  And  he  began  to  preach.' 
6  See  infra,  §  32,  6,  §  52,  2. 


326      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

into  closer  accord  with  the  texts  of  Matthew  or  Luke,  but  to  the 
hypotheses  of  an  '  original  Mark,'  which  according  to  some  was 
shorter  than  the  form  we  now  have,  according  to  others  longer. 
Indeed,  some  have  actually  gone  so  far  as  to  distinguish  a 
first,  second  and  third  Mark.  The  least  hazardous  of  all 
these  theories  is  that  of  the  existence  of  later  interpolations, 
such  as  vv.  i.  2,  3  ;  the  line  between  them  and  the  above- 
mentioned  '  emendations  '  is  indeed  not  easy  to  draw.  But 
even  here  it  is  well  to  proceed  with  caution  ;  Mark  i.  5-8,  for 
instance,  can  no  longer  be  taken  as  an  interpolation  direct 
from  Matthew,  as  soon  as  the  reader  follows  Codex  D  l  in 
reading,  as  against  all  other  versions,  '  clothed  in  a  garment 
of  camel's  skin '  (Sspptv  Kap,r]\ov)  instead  of  '  clothed  in 
camel's  hair  with  a  leathern  girdle  about  his  loins.'  -  The 
hypotheses  of  an  original  Mark  arise,  however,  only  from 
the  wish  for  a  simpler  solution  of  the  Synoptic  problem. 
They  can  never  have  been  based  on  the  study  of  Mark 
alone,  for  such  a  study  nowhere  produces  the  impression  that 
any  large  portion  has  dropped  out,  or  that  any  has  been  put 
in  by  a  strange  hand.  If  we  read  Matthew  and  Luke  beside 
him,  we  may  naturally  wonder  why  the  story  of  the  centurion 
at  Capernaum  does  not  exist  in  Mark,  still  more  why  he  has 
not  a  word  of  Matthew's  great  Sermon  on  the  Mount.  Is 
it  possible  that  even  the  'Lord's  Prayer'  should  not  have 
been  known  to  him,  or  that  he  should  not  have  thought  it 
worth  inserting  ?  All  the  same,  we  must  not  foist  these  items 
upon  the  '  original  Mark.'  putting  them  in,  say,  after  iii.  19, 
but  remind  ourselves  that  it  was  never  Mark's  intention  to 
write  a  complete  Gospel.  Besides  giving  us  in  the  first  place 
sayings  of  Jesus  which  represent  actual  events,  then  the  dis- 
cussions with  Pharisees,  Scribes  and  Sadducees,  and  the 
prophetic  utterances3  which  were  necessary  in  order  to 
prove  his  hero  at  every  turn  master  of  the  situation,  he 
contents  himself  with  setting  forth  in  but  few  examples  '  the 
actual  manner  in  which  Jesus  spoke  or  taught.  Even  there 
he  is  not  essentially  concerned  with  the  substance  of 
Jesus'  teaching  as  such,  but  wishes  to  demonstrate  that  the 


1  See  below  §§  32  par.  6,  52  par.  2. 

»  viii.  31  fol.,  ix.  30  fol.,  x.  32  fol.,  and  ch.  xiii. 


'  See  Matt.  iii.  4. 
4  iv.  1-34. 


§  26.]  THK    GOSPEL   ACCORDING    TO    MAKlv  327 

division  created  among  his  countrymen  by  his  activity, 
and  the  slow  progress  niado  hy  his  cause,  had  all  been  fore- 
told and  explained  in  advance  by  Jesus  himself :  that,  in 
fact,  he  had  not  only  foreseen  all  that  had  come  to  pass, 
but  had  not  even  desired  anything  else.  However  early 
or  late  the  Gospel  may  have  been  written — even  as 
an  abstract  of  Matthew  and  Luke  after  140  A.D. — it 
is  inconceivable  that  the  writer  should  have  been  un- 
acquainted with  the  many  sayings  of  the  Lord  which  are  not 
to  be  found  in  his  Gospel,  or  that  he  should  merely  have  put 
them  indifferently  aside,  while  it  is  equally  inconceivable  that 
these  sayings  can  .have  been  struck  out  by  a  later  hand.  And 
to  impute  to  mere  chance  the  disappearance — the  almost 
exclusive  disappearance— of  the  discourses  of  Jesus  would  be 
the  most  venturesome  supposition  of  all. 

But  Mark  certainly  did  not  write  with  a  constant,  though 
tacit,  reference  to  a  collection  of  Logia  from  which  the  reader 
might  fill  in  what  he  himself  left  unsaid  ;  his  work  does  not 
bear  the  character  of  a  supplement ;  his  object  rather  was  to 
provide  a  Gospel  as  aid  to  the  work  of  propaganda,  at  a 
time  when  men  were  beginning  to  recognise  that  they  must  no 
longer  confine  themselves  to  the  direct  action  of  person  upon 
person  if  the  command  of  Jesus  in  xiii.  10  was  to  be  fulfilled  in 
time,  but  must  invoke  the  power  of  the  pen — or  of  the  press, 
as  we  should  say  to-day — in  the  service  of  the  Gospel.  In 
fascinating  the  minds  of  unknown  readers  with  the  sublime 
picture  of  the  Saviour  of  the  world,  they  would  naturally 
emphasise  those  features  which  brought  out  what  was  kingly, 
irresistible,  divine  about  him,  though  of  course  their  choice 
would  be  subject  to  the  influence  of  Jewish  taste ;  on  the 
other  hand,  they  would  reserve  for  fellow-believers  the  rules 
of  conduct  he  had  laid  down,  his  teaching  concerning  prayer, 
trust  in  God,  the  forgiveness  of  sins,  etc.  We  should 
probably  proceed  in  just  the  opposite  way  among  our  own 
fellows ;  we  attribute  a  mightier  persuasive  power  to  the 
Lord's  Prayer,  to  the  parables  of  the  Prodigal  Son,  the  Good 
Samaritan,  the  Pharisee  and  the  Publican,  or  to  the  Sermon 
on  the  Mount,  than  to  any  of  the  miracle-stories  ;  but  Mark 
wrote  his  Gospel  for  his  own  contemporaries,  basing  it  upon 


328      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

the  experiences  of  long  years  of  missionary  toil.  We  can  fully 
understand  the  reasons  for  his  method,  and  we  recognise  in 
Matthew  and  Luke,  who  strive  after  an  ideal  of  completeness 
—especially  in  these  very  sayings — a  later  stage  of  Gospel 
literature ;  it  is  precisely  the  one-sidedness  of  Mark  that  gives 
us  the  strongest  proof  of  its  greater  age.  The  history  of  the 
text  may  show  that  our  accepted  version  of  this  Gospel  differs 
from  the  original  to  the  extent  of  a  few  interpolations  or 
suppressions,  but  our  idea  of  Mark  is  not  essentially  altered 
thereby.  And  that  idea  suits  perfectly  with  the  place  in 
history  to  which,  as  we  believe,  our  Mark  and  not  a  supposed 
primitive  version,  belongs. 

There  is  only  one  passage  in  the  existing  text  of  Mark 
that  we  must  unconditionally  reject,  and  that  is  the  coi- 
elusion,  vv.  xvi.  9-20.  There  is  an  obvious  discrepancy 
between  it  and  what  goes  before — for  we  had  been  led  to 
expect  appearances  in  Galilee, — the  style  exhibits  none  of 
Mark's  peculiarites,  the  verses  are  all  to  be  found  in  Matthew, 
Luke  and  John,  and  even  the  external  evidence  in  their 
favour  is  as  unsatisfactory  as  possible.  Jerome  had  hardly 
ever  come  across  the  passage  in  Greek  copies.  It  is  true 
that  Mark  cannot  originally  have  concluded  with  xvi.  8 — 
*  for  they  were  afraid ' ;  in  v.  7,  appearances  of  Jesus  are  fore- 
told, the  occurrence  of  which  the  Evangelist  must  naturally 
have  described.  For  this  reason  we  cannot  regard  as  genuine 
a,  second  and  quite  short  ending,  preserved  in  certain  Greek 
MSS.,  which  only  assumes  the  existence  of  these  visions, 
but  does  not  describe  them.  If  we  cannot  make  up  our 
minds  to  the  desperate  expedient  of  saying  that  Mark  was 
unable  to  finish  his  Gospel,  and  since  it  is  also  an  extremely 
precarious  assumption  that  the  last  verses  of  Mark  have  dis- 
appeared by  chance — perhaps  by  the  accidental  detachment 
of  the  last  leaf  of  the  autographon,  so  that  copyists  were 
compelled  to  stop  at  xvi.  8 — there  is  only  one  explanation 
left  to  us,  viz.  that  the  true  ending  was  intentionally  re- 
moved some  time  in  the  second  century,  before  the  book 
had  gained  Canonical  recognition.  This  was  probably  done 
because  it  was  felt  to  be  intolerable  that  one  Evangelist — 
i.e.  Mark — should  make  the  first  appearance  of  the  risen  Lord 


§  26.]  Till:    (10SPKL    ACCORDING    TO    MARK  329 

occur  in  (ialik-c.  and  before  Peter  alone,  while  the  others 
assigned  it  to  Jeni^ilrm,  before  the  women,  or  the  eleven,  or 
the  two  disciples  ^oing  to  Emmaus.  It  is  not  at  all  impossible 
that  Luke,  the  author  of  John  xxi.  and  the  author  of  the 
Gospel  of  Peter  were  still  acquainted  with  the  complete  text  of 
Mark,  nor  is  it  capable  of  the  smallest  proof  that  Matthew 
and  Luke  no  longer  possessed  it ;  but  in  historical  questions 
it  is  better  not  to  reckon  with  an  unknown  quantity.  What 
we  now  read  as  the  ending  of  Mark  is  an  attempt  to  help  out 
a  deficiency  so  grievous  in  a  sacred  book,  but  the  attempt 
cannot  have  been  simultaneous  with  the  suppression  of  the 
genuine  ending,  if  only  because  it  was  less  successful.  Pos- 
sibly we  ought  to  give  credence  to  an  Armenian  manuscript 
recently  discovered  by  Conybeare,  in  which  the  passage  in 
question  is  ascribed  to  the  presbyter  Aristion  (one  of  the 
principal  authorities  of  Papias,  and  therefore  probably  an 
Asiatic  theologian  of  about  the  year  110) ;  perhaps  the  verses 
were  not  originally  intended  as  a  substitute  for  the  piece  lost 
after  xvi.  8,  but  formed  part  of  an  apologetic-historical 
document  of  some  considerable  length.  If  this  is  so,  the 
value  of  the  traditions  handed  down  by  this  *  disciple  of  the 
Lord  '  may,  to  judge  from  such  an  example,  be  reckoned  at 
zero.  That,  however,  is  a  question  pertaining  to  the  history  of 
Christian  literature.  Here  we  are  only  concerned  with  the 
fact  that  the  ending  of  the  original  Mark  has  undoubtedly 
been  mutilated  ;  but  this  does  not  affect  our  judgment  with 
regard  to  the  rest  of  the  Gospel,  for  it  was  only  in  cases  of 
the  most  urgent  need  that  the  Early  Church  undertook  to 
make  suppressions  in  any  valued  work  of  edification. 

§  27.  The  Gospel  according  to  Luke 

[Cf.  works  mentioned  at  §  24.  Also  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  i.  2,  by 
B.  and  J.  Weiss  (ed.  8, 1892),  and  the  '  Internat.  Grit.  Commentary/ 
by  A.  Plummer  (ed.  3,  1900).  For  special  commentaries  see  P. 
Schanz,  1883  (see  §  25),  and  F.  Godet,  published  in  French  in 
1888  and  translated  into  German  by  Wunderlich  in  1892 — full  of 
ingenuity,  but  one-sided  and  without  any  historical  sense.  Cf. 
also  T.  Vogel's  '  Zur  Characteristik  des  Lucasevangelium  nach 
Sprache  und  Stil '  (1899),  an  amateur  philological  essay  deserving 


330      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

of  consideration  in  many  respects,  but  not  for  critical  questions 
A.  Harnack's  '  Chronologic  der  altchristlichen  Literatur,'  vol.  i. 
pp.  246-50  ('  Die  Zeit  der  Apostelgeschichte  und  der  drei  Evan- 
gelien  '),  and  his  article  entitled  '  Das  Magnificat  der  Elisabeth, 
nebst  einigen  Bemerkungen  zu  Lc.  i.  u.  ii.'  in  the  '  Sitzungsberichte 
der  koniglichen  preussischen  Akademie  der  Wissenschaf t '  for  1900, 
pp.  538-556.] 


1.  There  is  no  tradition  worthy  of  the  name  concerning 
Luke,  whom  Papias  did  not  know,  or  at  any  rate  did  not  mention. 
The  ancients  were  universally  agreed  that  the  writer  was  that 
Luke,  disciple  of  Paul,  who  is  mentioned  in  Philem  24, 
2.  Tim.  iv.  11,  and  called  '  the  physician '  in  Col.  iv.  14 :  pre 
sumably  a  native  of  Antioch.  Eusebius  naturally  lays  stress 
on  the  fact  that  he  was  on  intimate  terms  with  the  other 
Apostles ;  Irenaeus  was  of  opinion  that  the  Gospel  had  only 
been  written  after  the  death  of  Paul,  but  later  writers  take 
care  to  fasten  the  responsibility,  as  in  the  case  of  Mark,  on  the 
Apostle  himself.  Happily  for  us,  the  author  has  supplied  a  pro- 
logue to  his  Gospel  in  which,  it  is  true,  he  says  nothing  of 
himself,  but  explains  his  motives  for  writing.  From  this  we 
learn  (1)  that  he  is  not  attempting  anything  unheard  of,  for 
many — of  whom,  according  to  the  natural  interpretation  of 
the  words,  none  were  eye-witnesses — had  attempted  to  com- 
pile an  account  of  what  was  Christian  history  tear  s^o^jv  ; 
(2)  that  he  does  not  belong  to  the  original  eye-witnesses,  does 
not  even  claim  to  have  had  close  relations  with  them  or  with 
any  one  of  them,  for  he  only  wishes  to  write  '  even  as  they 
delivered  them  unto  us '  (that  is,  to  us  Christians  of  a  later 
day :  of  himself  he  writes  directly  afterwards  in  the  singular, 
e'Sofe  Kafioi)  ;  (B)  that  the  older  Gospels  do  not  satisfy  him, 
because  they  have  not  traced  '  the  course  of  all  things  ac- 
curately from  the  first,'  and  because  their  '  order,'  i.e.  the 
chronological  arrangement  of  the  individual  parts,  is  faulty ; 
(4)  that  he  bsist-s  his  confidence  of  being  able  to  produce  some- 
thing bettor  than  his  predecessors,  not  on  any  gift  of  inspiration 
that  had  U:en  imparted  to  him,  but  on  his  own  exhaustive 
and  methodical  labours.  The  prologue  might  indeed  have 
been  prefixed  to  any  work  of  profane  history  just  as  aptly  as 
to  this,  and  it  is  not  religions  hesitation  .-it  the  boldness  of 


$  27.]  TII1«:    GOSI'KL   ACCORDING   TO    LUKM  331 

venturing  to  write  down  the  sacred  story  that  underlies  verse 
3,  but  a  feeling  of  the  difficulty  for  him,  who  was  no  eye- 
witness, of  carrying  out  the  task  he  had  undertaken. 

The  question  as  to  whether  the  celebrated  companion  of 
Paul  was  the  author  of  this  Gospel  cannot  be  decided  without 
reference  to  the  Acts.  We  shall  therefore  leave  it  to  be  dis- 
cussed in  §  32,  pars.  3  and  5,  and  shall  here  content  ourselves 
with  obtaining  some  idea  of  the  peculiarities  of  the  Gospel. 

2.  According  to  verses  3  and  4  of  the  prologue,  the  author 
wrote  his  Gospel  for  a  person  who  was  either  a  Christian 
catechumen  or  who  at  any  rate  displayed  an  interest  in 
Christianity :  *  that  thou  mightest  know  the  certainty  concern- 
ing the  things  wherein  thou  wast  instructed.'  This  man, 
Theophilus,  evidently  a  person  of  some  distinction  (here  he  is 
greeted  as  tcpdna-rs  <*)eo<^Xs,  in  the  Acts  merely  as  o>  Bso</>tXe, 
a  fact  from  which  the  omniscient  critics  have  concluded  that 
in  the  interval  between  the  writing  of  the  Gospel  and  the  Acts 
Theophilus  became  more  intimate  with  Luke  and  was  probably 
baptised  by  him),  is  certainly  not  the  only  reader  whom  Luke 
expected  to  have,  still  less  a  fictitious  personage  in  whom 
every  '  friend  of  God '  was  to  recognise  himself,  but  it  was  to 
him  that  the  writer,  according  to  the  custom  of  those  days, 
dedicated  his  book  when  he  committed  it  to  the  public.  The 
purpose  which  it  was  intended  to  serve,  however,  may  never- 
theless be  gathered  from  verse  4  :  Luke's  object  is  to  increase 
the  convincing  power  of  the  Gospel  through  the  improvements 
which  he  could  offer  in  the  presentation  of  the  Gospel-stories. 
But  there  is  nothing  to  indicate  that  he  claimed  to  write  the 
Gospel  in  a  new  spirit  and  according  to  a  better  interpretation  ; 
his  predecessors  themselves,  according  to  verse  1,  had  not 
written  of  anything  but  '  those  things  which  are  most  surely 
believed  among  us,'  and  this  alone  inclines  us  to  look  askance 
on  the  theory  that  he  had  a  special  purpose  in  writing, 
whether  of  an  ultra  Pauline  or  a  conciliatory  character.  In 
fact,  the  indications  of  purpose  (tendenz)  discovered  by  the 
critics  mutually  destroy  one  another.  It  is  true  that  the 
paragraph  in  Matthew  so  strangely  favourable  to  the  Law  ! 
does  not  appear  here,  but  in  reality  Luke  says  the  same  thing 

1   v.  17  fol. 


332      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

in  xvi.  17 — if  anything,  in  still  more  emphatic  language ;  it 
is  true,  too,  that  besides  the  sending  out  of  the  Twelve  to 
preach  the  Gospel l  he  relates  an  exactly  similar  proceeding  in 
the  case  of  seventy  others,  who  are  sent  forth  two  by  two 2 ; 
but  how  can  there  be  any  question  here  of  an  attempt  to 
thrust  the  Twelve  out  of  their  position  of  authority,  or  of  a  slight 
cast  upon  the  original  Apostles,  when  a  little  further  on  3  we 
find  the  precedence  of  the  Twelve  in  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven 
recognised  exactly  as  in  Matthew 4  ? 

Pauline  ideas  and  expressions,  on  the  other  hand,  are 
scattered  but  scantily  through  Luke  ;  the  '  justified  '  of  xviii. 
14,  or  the  words  '  that  they  may  not  believe  and  be  saved,'  in 
the  parable  of  the  sower,5  have  a  Pauline  ring,  and  the  tyopria 
Sva^do-ra/cra  of  xi.  46  might  also  be  compared  with  Galatians 
vi.  5,  fyopriov  Pao-rdo-si ;  the  *  grace '  (%dpis)  which  was  so 
all-important  to  Paul  is,  while  wholly  absent  in  Mark  and 
Matthew,  to  be  found  here  eight  times,  and  still  more  fre- 

.  quently  in  the  Acts,  but  not  in  the  specifically  Pauline  sense 6 ; 
the  reverence  with  which  Luke  reserves  the  death  on  the 
Cross  to  Jesus  alone,  while  he  uses  the  expressions  '  put  to 
death,'  *  hanged,'  for  the  two  malefactors,  in  contradistinction 
to  Mark  and  Matthew 7  (though  in  verse  33  he  is  obliged  by 
his  construction  to  admit  the  aravpovv  in  their  case  also)— 
reminds  us  of  the  sacredness  of  the  '  word  of  the  Cross  ' 
in  Paul's  mind  ;  finally,  x.  8,  *  eat  such  things  as  are  set  before 
you,'  agrees  word  for  word  with  1.  Corinthians  x.  27  ;  but  the 
remarkable  resemblance  between  the  accounts  of  the  Last 

~  Supper  in  Luke  and  1.  Corinthians  8  rests  textually  upon  an 
uncertain  foundation.  The  beautiful  parable  of  the  unprofit- 
able servants9  certainly  destroys  the  delusion  of  man's 
claims  upon  God  for  reward  with  true  Pauline  energy,  but  the 
idea  implied  therein  of  the  necessity  of  '  doing  all  the  things 
that  are  commanded  '  would,  on  the  other  hand,  not  have  been 
admitted  by  Paul,  and  moreover  a  genuine  saying  of  Jesus 
cannot  be  invoked  to  attest  the  theological  tendencies  of  Luke. 
We  do  not  wish  to  deny  the  writer  a  knowledge  of  Paul's 

1  ix.  1-6.  -  x.  1-16.  ii.  30.  4  xix.  28. 

b  viii.  12.  6  See  especially  vi.  32-34  and  xvii.  9. 

7  Mark  xv.  27  and  32  ;    Matt,   xxvii.   38  and  44,   ol  o-vi>«rTavp<i>/j.fvoi   avv 
avrf.  8  Luke  xxii.  19  fol. ;  1  Cor.  xi.  24  fol.  9  xvii.  7-10. 


§  27.]  TIIK    (iOSl'UL    ACCORDING   TO    LUKK  333 

*  gospel '  and  of  some  of  his  Epistles,  but  he  certainly  made 
no  attempt  to  propagate  the  fundamental  ideas  of  PauliniBin 
by  means  of  the  sacred  story.     Broadly  speaking,  he  owes 
neither  more  nor  less  to  Paul  than  did  the  whole  Church : 
i.e.  the  ideas  of  the  universality  of  salvation ]  (on  account  of 
which  he  gives   so   much  prominence  to   the  Samaritans  ) 
and  of   the  boundlessness  of   God's  mercy,  as  set  forth  in 
the  parable  of   the   prodigal   son :!  and  the  incident  of   the 
malefactor ;  '  but  it  is  precisely  in  these  two  points  that  Paul 
was   no   more  than  a  faithful  and  consistent  interpreter  of 
Jesus.     Where  we  should  undoubtedly  have  been  obliged  to 
recognise  the  disciple  of   Paul — i.e.  in  doctrines  of   a  pre- 
existing Christ  or  of  the  atoning  value  of  his  death — Luke 
fails  us  altogether  ;  the  special  features  of  his  picture  of  Jesus  : 
his  boundless   love  towards  sinners,  showing  itself  even   in 
his  prayer  from  the  Cross  for  his  enemies 5 ;  his  kindly  com- 
passion towards  the  '  despised  of  men '  and  his  whole-hearted 
sympathy  with  all  misfortune — these  are  but  the  accentuation 
of  what   we  learn   from  Mark  and   Matthew,   certainly  not 
undertaken  with  the  intention  of  furthering  Pauline  theology, 
and  in  fact  solely  due  to  the  writer's  longing  to  win  for  his 
Saviour  the  sympathy  and  trust  of  Hellenic  readers.     We 
are  therefore  justified  in  saying  that  Luke  relates  the  Gospel- 
story  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  later  Gentile  Church,  with- 
out any  infusion  of  theology. 

The  author  must  certainly  be  regarded  as  a  Gentile 
Christian,  and  a  born  Greek — as  was  the  case  with  Luke, 
according  to  Colossians6 — not  only  because  of  his  fluency 
in  the  use  of  Greek,  but  because  he  avoids  every  Hebrew 
word,  betrays  not  the  smallest  knowledge  in  his  Old  Testa- 
ment quotations  of  the  original  text,  and  is  unacquainted  with 
the  scene  in  which  the  events  of  his  Gospel  are  enacted,  so 
that '  Judaea '  can  mean  the  whole  of  Palestine  to  him.7  Almost 
more  significant  is  the  indifference  he  displays  towards  the 
declarations  of  Jesus  on  the  subject  of  Jewish  customs  and 
Jewish  parties ;  he  passes  over  in  silence  the  dispute  about 

1  xxiv.  47.  2  x.  33  and  xvii.  16  ;  cf.  ix.  52-56. 

3  xv.  11  etc.  *  xxiii.  39  fol.  5  xxiii.  34. 

G  iv.  10-14.  7  i.  5,  vi,  17,  vii.  17,  xxiii.  5. 


334       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  j. 

uncleanness,  for  instance,  which  is  reported  by  both  the 
other  Synoptists.1  These  questions  had  as  little  actual 
interest  for  him  as  for  his  readers,  for  whose  benefit  he 
explains  the  word  '  scribes  '  (7 pa/* par si?)  six  times  by  the 
addition  of  vopiicoi,  turning  it  into  l  lawyers,'  2  and  once  ; 
translates  it  into  vofjLaSt,&do-Ka\oi,  '  doctors  of  the  law.'  If 
Luke  carries  the  genealogy  of  Jesus 4  back  to  Adam  instead  of 
only  as  far  as  Abraham,3  he  intended  thereby  neither  to 
protest  against  the  sonship  of  the  Lord  to  Abraham  or  David 
(which  he  seems  rather  to  acknowledge  in  verses  31  and  34) 
nor  to  excite  any  profound  meditations  concerning  Jesus  as 
the  second  Adam,  the  new  creation  ;  he  merely  shows  by  so 
doing — assuming,  indeed,  that  we  owe  the  list  to  him  at  all — 
his  love  of  scholarly  completeness,  coupled  indeed  with  the 
secondary  desire  to  emphasise  the  man  in  Jesus  more  clearly 
than  the  Jew.  His  determination  to  relate  *  all  things  from 
the  first '  is  responsible  for  his  birth-  and  childhood -stories, 
which  go  back  as  far  as  the  annunciation  of  the  birth  of  John 
the  Baptist,  describe  in  great  detail  the  miraculous  surround- 
ings in  which  the  birth  of  the  Saviour  was  accomplished,  and 
do  not  even  lose  sight  of  Jesus  when  he  had  grown  to  boy- 
hood ;  to  this  also  we  owe  his  conclusion,  which  gives  a 
remarkably  full  account  of  the  intercourse  of  the  risen  Christ 
with  his  faithful  followers,  and  ends  with  a  brief  report  of  his 
Ascension.  The  other  promise  made  by  Luke  in  the  prologue, 
that  he  would  give  the  chronological  data  more  accurately 
and  state  the  relationship  between  individual  scenes  with 
greater  clearness,  is  also  fulfilled  by  the  dates  he  furnishes  in 
the  opening  chapters/'  especially,  however,  by  iii.  1  and  2, 
where  the  year  of  the  beginning  of  the  Baptist's  activity  is 
established  by  a  sixfold  synchronism.  Later  on,  too,  he 
often  makes  the  most  loyal  efforts  to  fix  in  some  degree  the 
time  at  which  a  particular  event  takes  place,  as  at  ix.  37, 
'  on  the  next  day,  when  they  were  come  down  from  the  moun- 
tain,' or  at  xiii.  1.  The  '  Great  Interpolation  ' 7  is  also  made 
with  a  view  to  a  better  chronology  of  the  life  of  Jesus,  and 

1  Mark  vii.  Matt.  xv.  2  This  only  occurs  once  in  Matthew,  xxii.  35. 

3  v.  17;  also  Acts  v.  34.  4  iii.  23-38.  5  Matt.  i.  1-17. 

•  i.  5.  ii.  I  fol.,  ii.  42,  iii.  23.  •  ix.  51  fol. 


I 


I 


§  27.]  TIIK    cnsi'KF,    ACCORDING    TO    LUKK  335 

the  remarks,  characteristic  of  Luke,  concerning  the  occasion 
(or  the  tendency}  of  any  saying  of  Jesus  '  are  likewise  prompted 
by  his  efforts  after  the  greatest  possible  precision. 

All  this,  however,  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  writer's 
religious  attitude.  Only  in  one  point  is  this  perceptibly 
different  from  that  of  the  other  Evangelists ;  even  without 
any  comparison,  we  are  struck  by  the  unworldliness  of  his 
tone,  by  his  aversion  to  property  and  enjoyment,  by  his 
glorification  of  poverty,  his  accentuation  of  the  duty  of  self- 

•ifice  and  especially  of  almsgiving.  One  need  merely  read 
Luke  xiv.  26  and  33  beside  Matt.  x.  37  in  order  to  feel  the 
sternness  of  Luke's  demands ;  one  almost  has  the  impression 
that  the  boundless  charity  towards  sinners  shown  by  this 
Gospel  was  to  be  compensated  for  by  the  equally  exalted 
character  of  the  demands  made  on  the  disciples.  Other -j 
world  ethics  finds  its  place  by  the  side  of  other-world  re- 
ligion, and  is  fully  conscious  of  its  own  rights  ;  to  be  blessed, 
loving  and  loved  in  the  next  world  meant  that  in  this  th< 
Christian  must  be  wretched,  hating  and  hated.  '  Blessed  are 
the  poor,'  '  Woe  unto  you  that  are  rich,  for  you  have  received 
your  consolation  ' 2 — this  is  Luke's  version,  and  the  command- 
ments of  xiv.  12  and  xviii.  22  ('  sell  all  that  thou  hast ')  and 
the  incidents  of  xiv.  21  and  xix.  8  are  all  in  the  same  tone. 
The  most  striking  instance,  however,  is  the  parable  of  Dives 
and  Lazarus,3  according  to  which  poverty  and  need  per  se 
will  open  the  way  to  Heaven,  while  riches  and  prosperity  appear 
certain  to  be  rewarded  by  eternal  torment.  Mammon,  or  the 
possession  of  great  wealth,  is  simply  unrighteousness,4  but  the 
possessor  still  has  the  power  of  winning  eternal  life  by  dis- 
tributing his  goods — *  Make  to  yourselves  friends  by  means  of 
the  mammon  of  unrighteousness,  that,  when  it  shall  fail  [or, 
when  your  end  approaches],  they  may  receive  you  into  the 
eternal  tabernacles.'  This  is  a  metaphorical  expression  and 
cannot  be  pressed,  but  Luke  certainly  takes  the  idea  very 
seriously,  that  the  future  glory  was  to  act  as  compensation  to 
those  who  had  suffered  and  gone  hungry  while  on  earth. 

Thus  it  has  been  suggested  that  this  Gospel  bears  an 

1  E.g.,  xviii.  1  and  9,  xix.  11.     '  Because  he  was  nigh  to  Jerusalem,  and  they 
supposed  that  the  Kingdom  of  God  was  immediately  to  appear.' 

1  vi.  20  and  24.  3  xvi.  19-31.  «  xvi.  9  and  11. 


336      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTA-MEM1      [CHAP.  i. 

Ebionite  stamp,  and  traces  of  Jewish  influences  and  authorities 
have  been  sought  within  it.    This,  however,  is  a  great  mistake  ; 
the  attitude  maintained  by  Luke,  of  mistrust  towards  the  world 
and   hostility   towards   all   present   enjoyment,    an    attitude 
which  can  be  traced  back  to  the  Cynical  philosophy  or  to  the 
dualistic  ideas  existing  at  the  bottom  of  all  forms  of  religion 
about  the  beginning  of  our  era,  with  just  as  much  probability 
as  to  certain  special  phenomena  of  later  Judaism — such  an 
attitude  was  characteristic  of  the  whole  of  the  post-Apostolic 
Church,  and  was  only  suppressed  by  a  sort  of  compromise  at 
a  later  time.     The  Third  Gospel  reminds  us  of  the  Epistle  of 
James  and  the  Christianity  reflected  therein  ;    it  has  a  strong 
tinge  of  primitive  Catholicism,  though  without  the  ecclesias- 
tical feeling  of   Matthew ;  but   yet  in  the  moulding  of   his 
materials  the  writer  gives  expression  to  that  other  state  of 
mind  also,  and  more  naively  than  Matthew — that  is  to  say, 
encouraged    by   his    delight   in    hyperbolical   language   and 
striking  antitheses,  he  accentuates  the  traces  of   asceticism 
which  he  found  already  consciously  existing  in  the  tradition. 
But  there  can  be  no  question  of  any  deliberate  colouration  of 
the  Gospel  story  in  the  interests  of  Ebionitism. 

3.  That  Luke  was  written  some  time  after  the  destruction 
of  Jerusalem  in  the  year  70  is  proved  beyond  question  by  xxi. 
21-24,  in  which  the  terrible  events  of  the  Jewish  War  are 
looked  upon  as  things  of  the  past.  The  accuracy  of  these 
descriptions  has  even  been  explained  by  some  as  the  result  of 
the  dependence  of  Luke  on  the  writings  of  the  eye-witness 
Josephus.  His  prologue  alone,  however,  which  shows  the 
evangelistic  literature  already  in,  full  flower,  compels  us  to 
adopt  the  last  years  of  the  first  century  as  the  earliest  possible 
date.  The  external  evidence  would  moreover  admit  of  its 
composition  about  the  beginning  of  the  second  century,  and 
the  silence  of  Papias  concerning  Luke  remains  important. 
Its  conception  of  Christ  and  Christianity,  of  Law  and  Revela- 
tion, has  also  many  more  analogies  among  the  documents  of 
the  second  century  than  among  those  of  unquestionably 
earlier  origin.  The  emphasis  with  which  even  the  risen  Jesus 
here  appeals  to  the  authority  of  Prophets  and  Scripture  is 

1  xxiv.  25_27  and  44-46. 


§27.]  Till;  (JOSPEL    ACCORIHM;    TO   LUKK  337 

noteworthy,  and  the  colours  in  which  the  author  paints  the 
miraculous  incidents,  especially  those  at  the  beginning  and 
end,  remind  us,  though  as  yet  distantly,  of  the  taste  of  an  age 
which  gave  the  rein  to  its  imagination  in  the  creation  of  the 
Apocryphal  Gospels.  A  more  definite  date  might  be  fixed  on 
comparing  this  Gospel  with  Matthew  and  John  (or  possibly  by 
the  help  of  the  Acts),  but  for  the  present  we  must  be  content 
to  leave  the  whole  period  between  80  and  120  A.D.  open. 

4.  From  the  very  beginning  the  structure  of  the  sentences 
in  the  Prologue  is  sufficient  to  show  that  the  writer  was  a  man 
of  considerable  rhetorical  culture.  He  is  completely  master 
of  the  language,  for  though  the  Greek  he  writes  is  by  no 
means  classical,  it  is  perfectly  fluent  and  in  a  sense  refined. 
He  alone  among  the  New  Testament  writers  uses  words  like 
rvyxdveiv  TWOS  and  <j)opT%st,v  with  a  double  accusative  ;  he 
knows  the  rules  of  Greek  grammar  and  syntax,  and  generally 
observes  them.  Then,  on  the  other  hand,  we  may  frequently 
light  upon  a  strong  Hebraism,  especially  in  the  birth-  and 
childhood-stories,  which  read  like  a  piece  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment even  in  a  good  translation.  But  in  many  passages 
throughout  the  Gospel T  a  clear  glimpse  of  their  Aramaic  founda- 
tion may  be  caught,  and  even  in  the  resurrection  narrative  (the 
appearance  of  Jesus  to  the  disciples  going  to  Emmaus),  for 
which  the  writer  is  generally  considered  to  be  solely  responsible, 
the  influence  of  Semitic  modes  of  speech  is  remarkable.  We 
have,  for  instance,  in  xxiv.  38,  8ia\oiyi<T/jiol  avaftaivovcnv  sv  rf) 
tcap&La  vpwv  ;  in  xxiv.  32,  '  our  heart  was  burning  within  us,' 
and,  more  than  this,  the  variant  Pepapvjttfw)  for  Kcuopevij 
is  only  to  be  explained  by  the  help  of  Syriac,  in  which  *i*p* 
might  have  been  mistaken  for  *vp\  Harnack  declares  that  the 
Hebraisms  in  the  Psalms  which  Luke  puts  into  the  mouths  of 
Mary  and  Zacharias  2  are  conscious  on  his  part,  that  their 
whole  style  is  artificial  and  intended  to  produce  an  impression 
of  antiquity.  There  is  certainly  much  in  these  canticles  that 
seems  to  suggest  the  authorship  of  the  Third  Evangelist,  but 
if  Harnack  is  right,  Luke  must  not  only  have  been  a  past 
master  in  the  art  of  imitating  styles,  but  must  also  have 
made  a  deliberate  use  of  his  art  in  the  Gospel.  In  most 

1  E.g.,  xiii.  9,  xx.  10.  2  i.  46-55  and  68-79. 

Z 


338      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

instances,  however,  the  Semitic  dress  is  due  to  the  presence  of 
Aramaic  authorities  which  Luke  reproduces  with  tolerable 
accuracy,  and  in  reality  we  miss  a  conscious  and  measured  art 
more  in  Luke's  Gospel  than  in  the  others — wherever,  at  least, 
it  is  possible  to  trace  his  method  of  procedure  at  all ;  so  that 
in  certain  portions  it  bears  the  appearance  of  a  compilation 
more  markedly  than  either  Mark  or  Matthew.  Thus,  since 
none  have  ever  regarded  Luke  as  a  mere  translation  from 
the  Aramaic,  the  most  probable  assumption  seems  to  be  that 
the  plentiful  traces  of  Aramaic  idiom  to  be  found  in  it  are 
due  either  to  the  documents  employed  by  the  writer,  or  to 
the  unconscious  influence  exerted  upon  his  own  style  (even  in 
places  where  he  was  writing  independently)  by  the  authorities 
he  was  accustomed  to  consult.  His  great  reputation  as  a 
writer  rests  upon  higher  merits  than  this  ;  he  has  a  wonderful 
power  of  maintaining  a  full  harmony  of  tone  throughout  the 
whole  length  of  his  narratives,  as  of  his  discourses  ;  he  knows 
how  to  attain  the  desired  effect,  and  the  stories  of  Mary 
Magdalene  1  and  of  Martha  and  Mary,2  the  parables  of  the 
Good  Samaritan  3  and  of  the  Prodigal  Son 4 — all  of  them 
peculiar  to  Luke— will  always  hold  their  place  among  the 
noblest  gems  of  the  narrative  art. 


§  28.  The  Synoptic  Problem 

1.  In  most  cases  the  existence  of  several  accounts  of  the 
name  period  of  history  is  a  pure  gain,  and  raises  no  difficulties  : 
it  is  almost  always  easy,  for  instance,  to  reconcile  two  or  three 
different  biographies  of  a  saint  and  to  extract  the  true  story 
from  them.  If  we  possessed,  say,  only  Matthew,  John  and 
one  or  two  apocryphal  Gospels  as  the  sources  of  the  Gospel 
story,  the  corresponding  questions  might  probably  be  settled 
in  very  few  words.  The  Synoptic  problem  consists  in  the 
unique  commingling  of  agreement  and  disagreement— both 
in  every  conceivable  degree — which  a  comparison  between 
Matthew,  Mark  and  Luke  brings  to  light,  and  which  at  first 
sight  makes  it  seem  a  hopeless  undertaking  to  attempt  to 
describe  the  origin  of  the  three  Gospels  in  such  a  way  as 


vii.  36-50. 


2  x.  38-42. 


1  x.  30-37. 


4  xv.  11-32. 


i  28.]  TIIK  SYNOPTIC  PROBLEM  OO(J 

avoid  doing  any  violence  to  the  facts,  while  yet  unravelling 
the  tangle  of  peculiarities  and  agreements  which  those  three 
sources  present. 

How  far-reaching  is  the  unanimity  between  the  Synoptic 
Gospels  is  felt  as  soon  as  we  place  John  beside  them.     Their 
whole   outline   of  the  life  of  Jesus  is  the  same  ;  before  his 
first  appearance  in  public  come  the  baptism  in  the  Jordan 
and  the  sojourn  in  the  wilderness,  and  then  follows  a  period 
of  great   activity   in  Galilee,   with  Capernaum  as  the  base 
of   operations  ;    the  journey  to   Jerusalem  for  the  feast   of 
the  Passover   (which   is   moreover   the  first   he   makes   as 
Prophet,  so  that  we  are  obliged  to  limit  the  period  of  his 
Messianic  activity  to  a  year  at  most)  ushers  in  the  days  of 
his  Passion,  which  end  with  his  seizure,  crucifixion  and  re- 
surrection on  the  third  day.     The  last  three  chapters  run  side 
by  side  in  all  three  Gospels,  and  even  from  the  entry  into 
Jerusalem  {  the  sequence  of  the  important  events  and  sayings 
is  the  same,  while  as  in  the  case  of  the  Baptism,  Temptation 
and  return  of  Jesus  to  Galilee,  so  the  preceding  account  of  the 
Baptist  and  his  preaching  is  given  by  all  the  Synoptists  in  the 
same  place  and  in  the  same  manner.     The  three  narratives 
consisting,  first,  of  the  healing  of  the  man  sick  of  the  palsy, 
next  of  the  calling  of  the  publican,  and  lastly  of  the  discourse 
concerning  fasting,  which  are  entirely  unconnected  internally, 
are  given  in  the  same  order  by  all  the  Synoptists,2  and  the 
same  may   be   said  of   the   stories   of   the   calming   of   the 
storm   and   of   the   Gerasene   demoniac.3     Reckoned  by  the 
natural  boundaries  of  the  paragraphs,  and  apart  from  the 
story  of  the  Passion,  50  to  70  sections  common  to  all  three 
Synoptics   have   been   enumerated,  and  this   is   about   half 
the  total  number  which  it  is  possible  to  distinguish.     Nor 
is    this    unanimity   ever    confined   merely   to    the   sense — 
although  there  it  extends  to  the  very  finest  gradations — but 
in  form  and  expression  it  reaches  so  far  that  whole  sentences 
in  Matthew,  Mark  and  Luke  are  almost  word  for  word  the 

1  Mark  xi.  1  fol. 

-  Mark  ii.  1-22;  Matt.  ix.  1-17  ;  Luke  v.  17-39. 

:!  Mark  iv.  35-v.  20  ;  Matt,  viii.  23-34     Luke  viii.  22-39. 

/  2 


340       AN    INTRODUCTION'    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  I. 

same.1  And  the  same  degree  of  unanimity  is  to  be  observed 
between  any  two  of  the  Synoptics  in  those  passages  which 
are  absent  in  the  third,  of!  which  80  to  50  have  been  distin- 
guished as  common  to]  Matthew  and  Luke  without  Mark, 
10  to  15  to  Mark  and  Matthew  without  Luke,  and  perhaps 
5  to  Mark  and  Luke  without  Matthew — always  apart  from  the 
last  three  chapters  in  each.  In  the  first  case,  for  instance,, 
the  preaching  of  John  2  is  rendered  in  exactly  the  same  words 
by  Matthew  and  Luke,  the  story  of  the  centurion  at  Caper- 
naum 3  almost  as  literally,  and  the  message  of  Jesus  to  John 
in  captivity,4  practically  without  variation ;  in  the  second, 
the  answer  to  the  question  of  the  sons  of  Zebedee,5  and  the 
account  of  the  healing  power  of  Jesus'  garment,6  are  identical 
in  Matthew  and  Mark,  while  in  the  third,  Luke  and  Mark 
agree  in  the  story  of  Jesus  and  the  demoniac  in  the  synagogue 
of  Capernaum,7  and  in  that  of  the  widow's  mite.8 

This  similarity,  however,  is  in  no  case  to  be  explained  by 
the  assumption  that  the  accounts  we  have  before  us  are  abso- 
lutely accurate  and  authentic  narratives.  Two  or  three 
eye-witnesses  would  never  agree  so  closely  in  their  account  of 
the  same  event  as  those  that  we  have  here.  Nor  must  we 
forget  that  they  give  us  only  a  very  small  selection  of  the  great 
mass  of  Jesus'  deeds  and  sayings.  If,  then,  this  selection  was 
made  with  such  striking  coincidence  by  all  three — the  same 
order  being  maintained  even  with  events  and  sayings  whose 
precise  date  was  by  no  means  determinable — such  coincidence 
cannot  have  been  the  work  of  chance.  But  the  most 
marvellous  thing  of  all  would  be  the  similarity  of  expression 
which  meets  us  just  as  much  in  the  reports  of  Jesus'  sayings 
as  in  the  narration  of  his  miracles  ;  those  sayings  must,  after 
all,  have  been  translated  from  Aramaic  into  Greek,  and  then 
we  are  to  suppose  that  two  or  three  independent  translators 

1  E.g.,  Mark  i.  7  fol.,  Matt.  iii.  11  and  Luke  iii.  16  ;  Mark  ii.  10,  Matt.  ix. 
and  Luke  v.  24  ;  Mark  ii.  22,  Matt.  ix.  17,  Luke  v.  37  fol.  ;  Murk  viii.  35,  Mat 
xvi.  25,  Luke  ix.  24;  Mark  xiv.  48,  Matt.  xxvi.  f>5,  Luke  xxii.  52h. 

Matt.  iii.  7''-10  and  12,  Luke  iii.  7b-9  and  17. 

Matt.  viii.  9,  Luke  vii.  8.  4  Matt.  xi.  4-6,  Luke  vii.  22  fol. 

Mark  x.  37-40,  Matt.  xx.  21-23. 

Mark  vi.  r,r,,  Matt.  xiv.  36.  7  Mark  i.  '23-  2r>,  Luke  iv.  B 

Mark  xii.  431'  fol.  Luke  xxi.  3  fol. 


§  28.]  Til!-:    SYNOPTIC    I'liolJLKM  341 

would  have  hit  upon  the  same  expressions  for  whole  passages 
together,1  no  matter  whether  it  were  a  question  of  common  or 
uncommon  words  ? 

If  we  felt  tempted  to  explain-  the  whole  array  of  facts  by 
the  supposition  that  the  writers  were  inspired,  such  a  theory 
would  at  once  be  excluded  by  the  equally  numerous  instances 
of  divergency,  which  also  extend  from  the  merest  matters  of 
form  to  the  most  important  differences  of  fact.  In  the  story 
of  the  healing  on  the  Sabbath,  which  all  three  Synoptists  tell 
in  practically  the  same  way,2  Mark  describes  the  situation 
thus  :  teal  YJV  s/csl  avOpwTros  s^pa^^EvrfV  £%<»z>  rrjv  X£^Pa  >  Luke 
thus  :  KOI  rfv  avOpwiros  EKSL  /ecu  T)  %etp  dVTOV  T)  Ssgia  r)v 
and  Matthew  thus  :  /cal  IBov  avOpcoTros  xslpa  syav 
This  sounds  as  though  each  writer  had  chosen  the  expression 
independently  to  describe  the  same  thing,  but  we  might  notice 
even  here  that  Mark  agrees  half  with  Luke  and  half  with 
Matthew,  while  the  partial  divergence  between  the  three  wit- 
nesses becomes  still  more  striking  in  the  succeeding  sentences. 
According  to  Mark  and  Luke  *  they  watched  him  '  in  the 
synagogue — though  Luke  names  a  subject,  namely,  the  Scribes 
and  Pharisees— upon  which  Jesus  himself  propounds  the 
question,  whereas  in  Matthew,  Jesus  is  asked  whether  healing 
on  the  Sabbath  be  lawful.  The  question  which  Jesus  sets  his 
adversaries  is  given  almost  in  the  same  words  by  Mark  and 
Luke,  but  quite  differently,  even  in  substance,  by  Matthew, 
whereas  then  again  Mark  and  Matthew  agree  in  representing 
the  effect  of  this  challenge  on  the  Pharisees  in  a  much  stronger 
light  than  Luke.  Matthew  adds  the  parable  of  the  leaven 3 
to  that  of  the  grain  of  mustard-seed,4  which  he  had  told  in  the 
same  connection  and  often  in  the  same  words  as  Mark,5  and 
Luke  also  gives  both  together,13  agreeing  far  more  closely 

1  Mark  xii.  44,  Luke  xxi.  4,  e/c  TOV  irepurffevovTos  avroTs  e/3aA.ov ;  Mark  vi.  56, 
Matt.  xiv.  36,  "va  atycavrai  TOV  itpaffirfSov  TOV  1/j.aTiov  avTOv  *  Matt.  iii.   12,  Luke 
iii,  17,  T^  TTTVOV   eV  rf?    Xe'P*  «»TOU,   Staicadapai  T^V   8.\wva   OLVTOV  ;   Mark   xiii.   25, 
Matt.  xxiv.  29,  Luke  xxi.   26,  of  8wd/j.eis  .  .  .  o-a\ev6-f)o-ovTat,  which  is  a 
quotation    from    Isaiah     xxxiv.    4,    rendered,    however,    in    the    Septuagint 
TUK-fjo-ovTai ;  and  finally  Mark  ii.  3,  Matt.  xii.  1,  Luke  vi.  1,  '  through  the 
Cornfields,'  5ta  (riropi/Acav. 

2  Mark  iii.  1-6 ;  Matt.  xii.  9-14  ;  Luke  vi.  6-11. 

3  xiii.  33.  4  xiii.  31.  5  iv.  31.  6  xiii.  18  fol. 


342      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

as  to  form  with  Matthew  than  with  Mark,  but  tells  them  in  an 
entirely  different  connection.  And  why  does  Matthew  bring  in 
the  two  breaches  of  the  Sabbath  :  much  later  than  Mark  and 
Luke  ?  How  is  it  that  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  of  Matt, 
v.-vii.,  which  is  entirely  absent  in  Mark,  does  indeed  reappear 
for  the  most  part  in  Luke,  much  of  it  even  in  the  very  same 
words,  but  scattered  over  ten  chapters,  from  vi.  to  xvi.,  in 
small  and  separate  sections  ?  The  birth -story  of  Matthew 
contradicts  that  of  Luke,  nor  do  the  genealogies  in  the  two 
Gospels  agree  any  better,  while  Mark  contains  not  a  word  of 
either.  Luke  and  Matthew  tell  the  parable  of  the  lost  sheep  - 
in  much  the  same  way,  but  those  of  the  lost  piece  of  silver 
and  of  the  prodigal  son,  which  Luke  brings  in  immediately 
afterwards,  and  which  maintain  the  same  tone  and  belong  to 
the  same  connection,  are  entirely  without  parallel  in  Matthew. 
Matthew  and  Mark  have  practically  nothing  to  correspond 
with  the  contents  of  Luke  xvi. — the  parable  of  the  unjust 
steward,  Dives  and  Lazarus,  and  certain  sayings  on  the  pride 
of  the  Jews  and  the  validity  of  the  Law — and  the  same  may  be 
said  of  the  two  stories  of  Sabbath  healing  in  Luke  xiii.  and  xiv. 
Matthew  in  his  turn  is  the  sole  reporter  of  various  long  sayings 
like  the  parables  of  xiii.  36-52,  or  that  of  the  labourers'  hire, '' 
or  the  description  of  the  Day  of  Judgment.4  The  peculiarities 
of  Mark,  on  the  other  hand,  cover  only  a  very  few  verses,  and 
include  but  one  complete  section — that  of  the  healing  of  the 
blind  man  of  Bethsaida/'  How  marked  are  the  differences 
which  occur,  too,  in  the  material  common  to  all  three  is  best 
shown  in  the  story  of  the  Resurrection — that  is,  in  Mark  xvi. 
1-8  and  its  parallels  in  the  other  two  Synoptics.  The  women 
who  go  to  the  sepulchre  with  spices  early  on  the  Easter 
morning  are  in  Mark  the  two  Marys  and  Salome,  in  Matthew 
the  two  former  only,  and  in  Luke  they  two  and  Joanna  and 
'  other  women  that  were  with  them.'  In  the  sepulchre  they  see, 
according  to  Mark  and  Matthew,  a  young  man  (an  angel  of  the 
Lord),  and  according  to  Luke  two  men  in  shining  garments  ; 
the  two  former  tell  us  that  the  Risen  Lord  appeared  to  his 
disciples  first  in  Galilee,  and  therefore  not  on  Easter-day  at 

1  xii.  1-1  i.  -'  Luke  x%.  3  7;  Matt,  xviii.  12-14. 

»  xx.  1   If,.  «  XXv.  31-4(3.  •  viii.  22-26. 


§  28.]  Tin-:  SYNOPTIC  pi;onu-;.M  343 

all,  while  Luke  relates  appearances  on  this  very  day  to  (Peter  ?), 
to  the  disciples  at  Emmaus  and  to  the  Eleven,  all  in  or  around 
Jerusalem.  Such  discrepancies  and  contradictions  are  so 
frequent  with  the  Synoptics,  even  among  otherwise  identical 
phrases,  that  if  we  ascribed  an  equal  value  to  all  three  reports, 
one  of  them  would  continually  be  cancelled  and  destroyed  by 
the  other  two,  so  that  we  should  be  obliged  to  dispute  the 
existence  of  any  trustworthy  tradition  concerning  Jesus.  The 
Church  has  therefore  just  as  strong  an  interest  as  historical 
science,  in  determining  what  relationship  our  three  authorities 
actually  bear  to  one  another,  and  what  well-attested  kernel  of 
truth  can  be  extracted  from  this  medley  of  contradiction  and 
agreement. 

2.  The  earlier  ecclesiastical  learning,  as  well  as  that  of  the 
older  Protestantism,  refused  to  recognise  this  state  of  things, 
and  avoided  the  necessity  of  admitting  variations  in  the  tradi- 
tion concerning  the  words  and  deeds  of  Jesus,  by  making 
'  Harmonies  of  the  Gospels '  in  which  the  parallelism  of  any 
two  accounts  which  differed  in  the  slightest  degree  was  denied  : 
so  that  a  threefold  feeding  of  the  five  thousand  and  a  twofold 
of  the  four  thousand  had  perforce  to  be  admitted,  merely  in 
order  to  avoid  the  necessity  of  saying  that  the  Evangelists 
differed  in  certain  respects  in  their  accounts  of  the  same 
incident.  Nevertheless,  the  Risen  Lord  cannot  have  appeared 
for  the  first  time  both  in  Galilee  and  Judaea,  and  are  we  to 
suppose,  too,  that  immediately  after  his  baptism  Jesus  was 
tempted  of  the  devil  twice,  according  to  the  same  plan,  only 
with  the  means  arranged  in  a  somewhat  different  order? 
Even  the  early  Church  showed  more  courage  and  common 
sense  than  this ;  men  pointed  to  the  natural  differences  of 
memory,  nor  was  any  objection  raised — even  by  Augustine 
— to  the  theory  that  the  later  Gospels  drew  from  the  earlier, 
i.e.  Luke  from  Mark  and  Mark  from  Matthew.  No  serious 
attempt,  however,  to  master  these  difficulties  by  scientific 
methods  was  made  till  the  latter  half  of  the  18th  century,  and 
now  the  countless  schemes  for  a  solution  of  the  Synoptic 
Problem  may,  in  spite  of  all  their  differences  of  detail,  be 
divided  into  four  main  hypotheses :  (a)  that  of  Tradition  ; 
(6)  that  of  the  employment  of  one  Gospel  by  the  other  ;  (c)  that 


344       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  I. 

of  the  existence  of  an  original  Gospel ;  and  (d)  that  of  the 
employment  by  the  Evangelists  of  numerous  scattered  frag- 
ments. The  two  latter  may  also  be  regarded  as  variations  of  a 
general  hypothesis  of  the  dependence  of  our  Gospels  upon 
earlier  authorities. 

The  first  hypothesis  (as  maintained,  among  others,  by 
Gieseler  and  Godet)  will  not  admit  the  dependence  of  any  of 
the  Gospels  upon  earlier  written  materials.  All  three  Synop- 
tists,  it  declares,  drew  from  the  rich  stream  of  oral  tradition 
which  continued  down  to  their  time,  and  which  had  very  early 
assumed  a  definite  form,  like  the  '  sagas  '  of  pre-literary  times. 
This  fundamental  type  might  be  recognised  in  the  element 
common  to  all  the  Synoptics,  while  the  variations  were  to  be 
ascribed  partly  to  the  tradition  itself,  which  was  never  fixed 
and  immutable,  and  partly  to  the  memory,  the  taste  and  the 
individuality  of  each  Evangelist.  A  grain  of  truth  lies  in  this 
conception — though  indeed  but  a  minute  one : — it  was  certainly 
not  till  comparatively  late,  and  not  till  the  Gospel  material  had 
gone  through  considerable  changes  and  become  fixed  in  a 
number  of  points,  that  the  oral  tradition  became  converted 
into  a  stationary,  written  tradition.  But  it  would  always 
have  been  incredible  that  the  '  many '  who  according  to  Luke'^ 
preface  had  written  Gospels,  should  all  have  worked  away  quite 
regardless  of  one  another,  and  that  Luke  himself  should 
merely  have  glanced  at  his  predecessors'  writings,  without 
using  them  as  materials.  And  how  are  we  to  explain  the  fact 
that  this  stamp  of  uniformity  extends  to  the  very  finest  shades 
of  the  Greek  idiom,  whereas  the  tradition  grew  and  took  final 
shape  only  on  Palestinian  soil,  and  had  no  common  meeting- 
ground  in  the  Greek  world  ?  Moreover,  when  we  remember, 
first,  the  remarkable  differences  which  appear  in  the  tradition 
itself  on  comparing  Paul's  account l  of  the  institution  of  the  Last 
Supper  and  of  the  appearances  of  the  Risen  Christ  with  those 
given  in  Matthew,  Mark  and  even  in  Luke,  or,  secondly,  the 
fact  that,  scattered  through  Matthew  and  Luke,  we  may  dis- 
cover certain  obvious  literary  peculiarities  of  Mark,  our  con- 
fidence in  the  '  fixed  tradition '  as  the  sole  common  foundation 
of  the  three  Synoptics  completely  disappears  ;  the  problem 

1   1.  Cor.  xi.  and  xv. 


§28.]  Til  K  SYNOPTIC    PIIOBLKM  345 

is  far  too  complex  to  admit  of  a  solution  by  so  simple  a 
formula. 

The  advocates  of  the  theory  of  dependence,  on  the  other 
hand — e.g.  Griesbach  and  the  Tubingen  school — approach 
the  matter  from  a  diametrically  opposite  point  of  view  ;  they 
seek  to  ascertain  the  relations  between  the  three  Synoptics, 
making  the  later  dependent  on  the  earlier,  and  declare  that, 
since  this  dependence  never  becomes  servile,  the  common 
matter  must  have  been  taken  from  the  older  Gospel  and  the 
variations  have  been  added  by  the  borrowers.  The  Tubingen 
school  have  the  advantage  here,  inasmuch  as  their  assump- 
tion that  the  Synoptics  were  party  documents  enables  them 
to  find  a  reasonable  motive  for  the  great  majority  of  variations 
in  the  supposed  dogmatic  or  ecclesiastical  '  tendency '  of  the 
Evangelists.  Unfortunately,  however,  the  variations  very 
seldom  present  any  trace  of  such  a  tendency,  and  if  the 
theory  of  dependence  be  not  already  ruled  out  by  the  fact 
that  in  the  question  of  succession  every  possible  grouping  of 
the  three  Synoptists  has  been  declared  the  only  true  one — for 
Mark  has  been  placed  now  first,  now  second,  as  the  adapter  of 
Matthew,  and  again  last  of  all,  as  the  colourless  abbreviator 
of  both  Matthew  and  Luke — we  should  yet  be  obliged  to  give 
it  up  on  the  ground  that  it  has  never  explained  the  fact  that 
in  the  parallels  between  Matthew  and  Luke,  where  Mark  is 
not  involved,  Matthew  appears  to  have  been  dependent  on 
Luke  and  to  have  inspired  him  in  an  almost  equal  degree. 

The  hypothesis  of  an  original  Gospel — supported  byLessing, 
J.  G.  Eichhorn  and  others — is  intermediate  between  the  two 
former ;  it  agrees  with  the  first  in  denying  the  dependence  of 
one  Gospel  upon  another,  and  with  the  second  in  declaring  it 
impossible  to  explain  the  relationship  between  the  three 
Synoptics  without  presupposing  the  existence  of  an  earlier 
written  document,  and  not  merely  that  of  an  oral  tradition. 
It  makes  all  three  Synoptics  dependent  on  a  written  source  of 
this  kind,  and  does  not  seek  to  identify  it  with  any  existing 
book  of  the  New  Testament— certainly  an  impossible  point  of 
view  for  the  orthodox  believers  in  Inspiration  !  This  documeut 
is  assumed  to  have  been  an  original  Gospel  of  great  richness 
and  antiquity,  embracing  the  whole  of  the  life  of  Jesus,  and  is 


346       AX    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

identified  by  some  with  the  Gospel  to  the  Hebrews,  or  is  at  any 
rate  considered  to  have  been  originally  written  in  Hebrew. 
From  this  the  three  Synoptists  are  supposed  to  have  drawn,  and 
hence  their  similar  construction  and  their  countless  points  of 
agreement  in  details  and  in  expression.  But  in  order  to  ex- 
plain the  striking  differences  between  the  three,  we  are  obliged 
to  admit  the  existence  of  several  successive  editions  of 
this  original  Gospel,  and  to  assume  that  each  Synoptist 
possessed  a  different  one — a  theory  which  in  reality  only 
shifts  the  difficulties  out  of  the  clear  domain  of  the  Canonical 
Gospels  into  the  darkness  of  a  vanished  literature,  a  litera- 
ture over  which  the  imagination  alone  holds  sway,  and  whose 
early  and  complete  disappearance  would  not  be  far  short  of  a 
miracle. 

An  improvement  on  this  view  is  offered  by  the  Fragment 
hypothesis  of  Schleiermacher,  which  affords  a  far  more  ade- 
quate recognition  of  the  idea  that  a  variety  of  sources  lie  at  the 
bottom  of  the  Synoptics,  as  well  as  of  Luke's  reference  to  his 
many  predecessors  and  of  his  criticism  of  them.  He  contends 
that  not  one  Gospel  only  should  be  assumed  as  the  fountain- 
head,  but  that  in  the  earliest  times  there  were  a  consider- 
able number  of  scattered  leaflets  of  very  diverse  bulk,  upon 
which  various  persons  had  written  down  recollections  of  their 
intercourse  with  Jesus,  or  whatever  they  had  heard  from 
others  in  the  way  of  sayings  or  unusually  impressive  deeds 
of  the  Lord.  Such  leaflets  would  naturally  not  have  been  pre- 
served very  long,  and  moreover  whoever  collected  them  must 
sometimes  have  lit  upon  duplicates  which  he  did  not  recognise 
as  such,  because  the  accounts  did  not  agree  in  every  point,  or 
perhaps  even  the  occasion  and  the  time  were  differently 
reported.  If  the  Synoptists  made  use  of  as  much  of  this 
floating  literature  as  was  accessible  to  them,  it  would  certainly 
be  conceivable  that  their  reports  would  at  times  be  word  for 
word  alike  and  at  times  entirely  different,  while  the  variations 
in  the  order  would  be  especially  easy  to  explain.  But  the 
existence  of  these  fragments  is  more  than  doubtful ;  in  the 
earliest  times  such  aids  to  the  memory  would  not  have  been 
required,  and  in  the  later  men  did  not  write  down  this  or  that 
particular  saying,  but  made  relatively  complete  collections  of 


§  28.]  THK    SYNOPTIC    PROBLEM  34.7 

them.  The  verbal  agreement  between  the  Synoptics  is 
altogether  too  far-reaching,  each  one  of  the  Gospels  too  much 
of  a  whole,  to  warrant  us  in  thinking  that  they  were  put 
together  out  of  a  shifting  mass  of  original  fragments. 

8.  If,  then,  the  older  hypotheses  are  all  found  wanting, 
and  if  all  of  them,  nevertheless,  contain  a  grain  of  truth,  we 
must  obviously  try  combining  them  in  order  to  get  nearer  to 
the  whole  truth.  In  the  first  place,  the  Synoptists  would 
scarcely  have  made  use  of  written  sources  only,  but  would  all 
have  had  some  connection  with  the  oral  tradition  (which 
their  younger  contemporary  Papias  actually  considered  of 
more  importance  than  the  written)  ;  but  it  is  still  more  cer- 
tain that  their  Gospels  were  not  written  independently  of  one 
another — that  one  at  least  of  them  must  have  been  known  to 
the  other  two ;  certain  also  that  they  made  use  of  a  non- 
canonical  written  source  as  well — most  probably,  indeed,  of 
several — so  that  the  only  question  that  remains  is  whether 
these  sources  should  be  regarded  rather  as  fragments  or  as 
original  Gospels.  An  improvement  in  the  direction  of  the 
desire  to  avoid  the  one-sidedness  of  the  older  hypotheses  has 
undoubtedly  taken  place  in  the  Synoptic  criticism  of  nearly 
all  schools  of  theology  ;  the  only  point  of  importance  now 
is  to  distinguish  accurately  between  those  questions  of  the 
literary  relationship  of  the  Synoptics  which  can  be  answered 
by  the  modern  school — brilliantly  inaugurated  as  it  was  by 
C.  H.  Weisse  and  C.  G.  Wilke  1— and  those  which  are  not  yet 
ripe  for  decision,  i.e.  which  with  the  means  at  our  command 
it  is  as  yet  impossible  to  answer  definitely. 

In  this  connection  we  must  warn  our  readers  against  the 
superstition  that  everything  in  the  Gospels  can  be  un- 
riddled and  made  logically  clear  by  critical  hypotheses.  The 
Synoptists  wrote  as  men,  and  every  personality  is  a  mystery 
beyond  a  certain  point.  It  would  be  mere  folly,  for  instance, 
to  try  and  lay  down  beforehand  the  method  which  Luke 
must  follow  in  dealing  with  his  materials — that  is,  to  throw 
over  all  the  results  of  previous  observation  if  once  we  met 
with  something  unexpected.  Least  of  all  in  the  case  of  the 
Synoptists  ought  we  to  hope  for  exact  results,  because 

1  In  Der  Urevangelist,  1838. 


348       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTA  MKXT     [CHAP.  I. 

their  text  has  been  modified  to  such  an  appalling  extent  in 
the  way  of  emendations,  harmonisations  and  additions — 
most  of  all,  of  course,  that  of  Mark ;  in  fact  it  is  impossible 
to  attempt  any  critical  work  with  Luther's  text,  and  even 
the  newest  and  best  editions  of  the  Synoptics  contain 
perhaps  hundreds  of  readings  which  have  supplanted  the 
original  version — very  early,  it  is  true,  but  all  the  more 
thoroughly  for  that.  If  the  original  reading  has  been  acci- 
dentally preserved  in  individual  cases  by  one  or  two  out  of  a 
hundred  witnesses  in  the  first  ten  centuries — by  a  Latin  or  a 
Syrian  copyist,  or  by  the  Codex  D — in  other  cases  it  must  surely 
have  disappeared  without  a  trace ;  this  is,  on  the  one  hand,  a 
warning  to  us  to  be  careful  in  drawing  conclusions  from 
isolated  observations,  and,  on  the  other,  it  encourages  us  to 
set  aside  the  timidity  which  only  ventures  to  accept  an  hypo- 
thesis if  it  explains  everything,  and  explains  it  in  the  most 
plausible  manner  possible. 

4.  Our  first  assertion  is,  that  Mar k  was  used  as  a  primary 
source  both  by  Matthew  and  Luke.  The  order  of  the  in- 
dividual sections  in  Mark  corresponds  best  with  the  actual 
course  of  history,  and  it  would  certainly  be  strange  if  the 
simpler  narrative  should  have  come  after  the  far  more  arti- 
ficial grouping  of  Matthew  or  Luke.  Besides,  Matthew  and 
Luke  keep  to  the  outline  of  Mark  in  all  essential  points,  ex- 
cept that  they  make  large  insertions  of  their  own  ] — though 
at  different  stages — and  occasionally  make  alterations  in  the 
order  to  suit  their  own  arrangement.  Thus  Matthew  in 
vv.  iii.  11-iv.  22  follows  Mark  i.  7-20  very  closely,  but 
then  leaves  out  all  but  i.  39  of  Mark,  in  order  to  bring  in  the 
great  Sermon  on  the  Mount  as  an  example  of  the  preaching 
of  Jesus,  before  returning  again  to  Mark  i.  29-ii.  22  in  his 
eighth  and  ninth  chapters.  In  this  way  the  scene  described 
in  Mark  i.  21-28,  in  which  Jesus  is  recognised  by  the 
demoniac  in  the  synagogue  of  Capernaum,  is  cast  aside,  not, 
we  may  be  sure,  because  Matthew  had  any  objections  to  it, 
but  because  before  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  he  could  find  no 
room  for  it,  in  the  miracle-stories  of  chap.  viii.  it  was  equally 
out  of  place,  and  afterwards  he  forgot  it.  The  order  of  the 

1   Matt,  v.-vii. ;  Luke  vi.  20-viii.  3  and  ix.  r>l-xviii.  14. 


§  28.]  Till;    SYNOPTIC    PROBLEM  o49 

separate  sections  in  the  collection  of  parables  of  Mark  iv.1  and 
Matthew  xiii.2  is  also  very  instructive  ;  Matthew  brings  in 
the  whole  of  Mark  except  vv.  21-24,  the  essential  points 
of  which  he  had  already  introduced  into  chaps,  v.,  vii.  and 
x.,  while  he  replaces  vv.  26-29  by  what  he  considers  a 
truer  version  of  the  same  parable,  and  enlarges  Mark's 
parable  of  the  grain  of  mustard-seed  by  that  of  the  leaven. 
That  Luke,  too,  is  directly  dependent  upon  Mark,  and  not 
merely  through  the  medium  of  Matthew,  is  shown,  for  instance, 
as  early  as  iv.  31-44,  where  Luke  brings  in  four  sections 
in  exactly  the  same  order  as  Mark  i.  21-39,  whereas  Matthew 
omits  two  of  them  altogether  and  inserts  the  other  two  con- 
siderably later,  in  chap.  viii.  Another  instance  is  afforded  by 
Luke  ix.  18-50,  where  the  writer,  after  borrowing  nothing 
from  Mark  since  verse  vi.  45,  returns  to  him  quite  suddenly 
in  order  to  reproduce  the  passage  from  viii.  27  to  ix.  40,. 
regardless  of  the  additions  3  and  omissions  4  made  by  Matthew. 
Luke,  on  his  side,  only  omits  ix.  10-13 — which  Matthew 
had  inserted  at  the  same  place  as  Mark — and  this  merely 
because  the  contentious  questions  of  Pharisaic  theology  did  not 
interest  him. 

But  an  exact  study  of  the  relationship  of  the  Synoptics 
in  the  sections  common  to  them  all  is  far  more  con- 
vincing still.  Let  us  take,  for  instance,  the  story  of  the 
man  sick  of  the  palsy."'  Here  each  of  the  three  has 
made  a  separate  introduction  for  himself,  but  in  Luke's 
case  some  dependence  on  the  ideas  of  Mark  seems  probable. 
After  this,  however,  the  similarity  of  the  three  accounts 
is  so  close  that  only  dependence  on  a  written  source  can 
explain  it.  Mark  has  three  phrases — /cal  IBoov  rrjv  TTLCTTLV 

ai)TO)V,G      Ti      SdTLV      £VK07T(t)T£pOV,      sllTSlv    .     .     .    ?}      ellTslv^      and 

especially  verse  10,  tva  &s  elSfjre  etc. — which  are  repro- 
duced word  for  word  in  Matthew  and  Luke,  while  verse 
5  corresponds  equally  closely  with  verse  2b  of  Matthew, 
and  vv.  4,  7b  and  12b  with  vv.  19,  21b  and  26  of  Luke! 

1  Vv.  1-34.  •  Vv.  1-35,  and  cf.  Luke  viii.  4-18. 

3  Matt.  xvii.  24-26.  4  Mark  ix.  38-40. 

3  Mark  ii.  1-12 ;  Matt.  ix.  1-8 ;  Luke  v.  17-26. 
6  Verse  5.  7  Verse  9. 


350      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  i. 


Mark  '  and  Luke  2  have  the  words  STTLJVOVS  and  S 
in  common  as  against  the  i$u>v  and  hOv^lo-Oca  of  Matthew, 
and  Luke's  £</>'  o  KarsKsiro  3  is  surely  a  reminiscence  of  Mark's 
OTTOV  6  TrapaKvTLKos  Kars/csiTo.*  What  Matthew  and  Luke 
have  in  common  as  opposed  to  Mark,  on  the  other  hand,  are 
the  words  lirl  K\ivr)s,h  where  Mark  uses  the  vulgar  tcpdfiaTTos, 
SLTTSV  6  where  Mark  has  \eyst,  TrspLTrdrsi  7  for  Mark's  ways, 
and  the  repetition  of  the  words  sis  rov  OLKOV  avrov  in  the 
carrying  out  of  Jesus'  command.  The  effect  upon  the 
spectators  is  spoken  of  by  Mark  as  an  egio-Tio-Qai  8  and  by 
Matthew  as  (fro/Bslo-Oat,,9  while  Luke  calls  it  sKfracris  and 
<f)6fiov  rr\v)<r0fjva4.  That  Mark's  account  is  here  the  earliest 
may  be  assumed  from  the  very  vividness  of  his  description  ; 
he  tells  us  of  the  lack  of  space,  of  the  uncovering  of  the  roof, 
and  that  the  paralytic  was  «  borne  of  four,'  while  Luke  only 
speaks  of  '  men  '  as  bringing  him  in,  and  Matthew  makes  no 
mention  of  any  agent  at  all.  Can  we  suppose  that  Mark 
derived  his  report  from  the  descriptions  of  both  Matthew  and 
Luke,  and  yet  succeeded  in  producing  the  freshest  and  most 
living  picture  ?  If,  moreover,  we  take  the  peculiarities  of  the 
wording  into  account  as  well,  and  compare  the  extent  and 
nature  of  the  material  shared  by  Mark  partly  with  Matthew 
and  Luke,  partly  with  Luke  alone  and  partly  with  Matthew 
alone,  his  priority  is  established  beyond  a  doubt  ;  and  the 
only  question  it  is  still  impossible  to  decide  from  an  examina- 
tion of  this  passage  is  that  of  the  relationship  between  Matthew 
and  Luke. 

Again,  let  us  compare  Mark  ii.  13-22  (the  calling  of  Levi 
[or  Matthew],  the  visit  of  John's  disciples,  the  twofold  parable 
of  the  new  piece  of  cloth  and  the  new  wine)  with  its  equivalents 
in  the  other  two  10  ;  nearly  half  this  passage  is  told  in  the 
same  words  by  all  three  writers,  save  that  Mark  has  a  much 
fuller  introduction,  and  repeats  the  idea  of  verse  19a  in  a 
slightly  different  form  in  19b  —  a  pleonasm  which  Matthew 
nnd  Luke  naturally  have  not  imitated.  Of  the  remaining 

1  Verse  8.  2  Verse  22.  3  Verse  25.  *  Verse  4. 

*  Matt,  verse  2  ;  Luke  uses  K\ivftiov,  vv.  19  and  24. 

:itt.  w.  2  and  4.  --se  5.  s  V,  ree  12. 

-  Verse  8.  10  Luke  v.  27-:'.'.)  ;  Mart.  i<..  '.1-17. 


§  28.]  THH    SYNOITU:  I'lJollLH.M  351 

part  Mark  shares  about  half  with  Matthew  as  against  Luke  : 
e.g.  verse  15,  '  many  publicans  and  sinners  sat  down  [to  meat] 
with  Jesus  and  his  disciples,'  where  Luke  has  *  there  was  a 
great  multitude  of  publicans  and  of  others,'  *  though  in  the 
next  verse  he  tells  us,  in  conjunction  with  Mark  and  Matthew,2 
that  both  publicans  and  sinners  were  sitting  at  table  with 
Jesus.  The  word  la^vovrss  a  little  further  down  :!  is  common 
to  Mark  and  Matthew  as  against  the  vyiaivovrss  of  Luke,  while 
Mark  21  and  Matthew  16  agree  in  such  very  unusual  phrases 
—  pd/covf  dyvd<f)oV)  aipst,  TO  7rX?;^(Wyu,a  djro,  Kai  ^slpov 
a-^i(Tfia  ryivsrai  —  that  all  idea  of  chance  is  set  -aside.  But 
Mark  and  Luke  also  agree  in  some  points  as  opposed  to 
Matthew  :  e.g.  in  the  name  Levi  instead  of  Matthew,  in  the 
word  vTja-Tsvsiv  4  instead  of  TrsvOslv^  in  the  antithesis  between 
the  new  and  the  old,6  and  in  the  words  '  the  wine  will  burst 
the  skins.'  On  the  other  hand,  Matthew  and  Luke  keep 
together  as  against  Mark  only  in  the  words  Sia  ri7  for  Mark's 
OTI,  eljrev  8  for  Mark's  \sysi,  S7rt/3d\\st,  9  for  ETripaTrrsi,  and 
sfc^sirai  real  aTrciKkwrai  10  for  the  simple  d7r6\\vrai  of  Mark. 
Such  alterations,  consisting  almost  entirely  of  the  most 
obvious  polishings  and  simplifications,  Luke  need  not  have 
copied  from  Matthew  nor  Matthew  from  Luke,  while  the 
agreement  between  Matthew  and  Mark  more  especially,  even 
apart  from  the  sentences  common  to  all  three,  is  far  too 
minute  to  admit  of  any  explanation  but  that  of  literary 
dependence. 

In  Mark's  version  of  the  third  prophecy  of  the  Passion11 
there  is  much  that  agrees  in  every  word  with  the  reports  of 
Matthew  1>J  and  Luke,I:5  but  we  are  struck  by  the  still  greater 
amount  of  material  common  to  Matthew  and  Mark  only, 
while,  on  the  other  hand,  the  words  SILTTTVZIV,  dTro/crsvovo-iv, 
dvaa-rrio-sTai,  l  '  of  Mark  are  only  to  be  found  reproduced  in 
Luke.15  The  only  thing  common  to  Matthew  and  Luke 
without  Mark  is  the  word  si-rev,  where  MarK  has 


Verse  29.  -  Mark  16;  Matt.  11.         3  Mark  17;  Matt.  12. 

Mark  19  ;  Luke  34.        5  Matt.  15.  (;  Marie  21"  ;  Luke  36. 

Matt.  11.  »  Matt.  12.  »  Matt.  16. 

0  Matt.  17  ;  Luke  has  kKx^O-fja-erai  Kal  aTro\ovvTa.t,  verse  .'57. 

1  Mark  x.  32-34.  I2  Matt.  xx.  17  -11).  ls  Luke  xviii.  31-34. 
11  Verse  34.                                     1*  Vv.  32  fol. 


352      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

\sysiv.1  In  fact,  an  exact  statistical  examination  of  the  points 
of  agreement  and  disagreement  between  the  three  Synoptics 
in  the  passages  common  to  them  all— most  convincingly  so, 
for  instance,  in  the  story  of  the  entry  into  Jerusalem  and  in 
the  parable  of  the  husbandmen — almost  invariably  yields  the 
following  results  :  Mark  coincides  with  Matthew  and  Luke  to 
an  astonishing  degree,  while  the  two  latter  without  Mark  only 
agree  in  such  things  as  the  insertion  of  a  Ss,  the  pleonastic 
repetition  of  a  \syovrs$  or  an  ISovrss,  or  the  substitution  ol 
a<ysi,v  for  (frspsiv,  spslrs  for  iiTrars,  SLTTS  for  \eysi.  This  hold* 
good  for  the  last  three  chapters  too,  at  least  for  those  parts 
of  them  into  which  Matthew  and  Luke  have  inserted  no  fresh 
episodes ;  and  hence  we  may  conclude  that  Mark  did  not 
skilfully  weave  his  stories  together  out  of  both  Matthew  and 
Luke— for  then  we  should  be  forced  to  assume  that  with 
an  extraordinary  partiality  he  always  chose  out  those  por- 
tions which  were  common  to  both  his  predecessors,  while 
to  explain  the  origin  of  those  portions  we  should  have  to 
resort  to  some  entirely  new  hypothesis, — nor  that  he  drew, 
together  with  Matthew  and  Luke,  from  some  original  sourc 
now  lost  to  us,  for  in  that  case  it  would  be  equally  extra- 
ordinary that  he  should,  practically  without  exception,  have 
appropriated  to  his  own  use  precisely  those  portions  which 
had  also  been  selected  thence  by  the  other  two.  Mark,  then, 
served  as  the  source  both  for  Matthew  and  Luke.  On  the 
whole,  Matthew  has  borrowed  more  from  Mark  word  for  word 
than  Luke  has  done,  but  we  may  best  see  how  closely  Luke 
clings  to  him  too,  in  examining  those  sections  which  are  only 
to  be  found  in  Mark  and  Luke.'2  Whether  in  the  passages 
shared  by  Mark  with  Matthew  and  Luke  or  with  only  one  of 
the  two,  it  is  almost  always  easier  to  understand  the  diver- 
gencies of  Luke  and  Matthew  from  Mark  on  the  suppositioi 
that  the  two  former  had  Mark  before  them,  than  vice  versa. 

It  is  also  for  the  most  part  superfluous  to  assume  fchc 
existence  of  an  additional  authority  for  the  alterations  made 
by  Matthew  and  Luke  in  the  text  of  Mark.  It  is  quite  natural 
that  they  should  have  moulded  his  reports  into  a  form  better 

1  Verse  :«. 

2  E.g.,  Mark  ix.  38-40  =  Luke  ix.  4(J  fol.  ;  Mark  xii.  11  44  =  Luke  xxi.  1-4. 


§  28.]  TllK    SYNOPTIC    1'KOP.LKM  353 

suited  to  their  own  interests  and  tastes,  and  thus  they  simply 
omitted  anything  which  seemed  to  them  questionable  '  or 
superfluously  detailed.2  If,  on  the  other  hand,  Matthew  names 
the  toll-gatherer  summoned  by  Jesus,  Matthew,3  while  Mark 
and  Luke  speak  of  him  as  Levi ;  if  Matthew  introduces4  into  the 
discussion  on  the  Sabbath  an  argument  about  the  sheep  falling 
into  a  well,  which  Mark  does  not  know,  and  Luke  brings  in 
elsewhere/'  or  if  Luke  inserts  at  the  end  of  a  passage  other- 
wise entirely  dependent  on  Mark  a  verse  peculiar  to  his 
Gospel  alone — *  And  no  man  having  drunk  old  wine  desireth 
new,  for  he  saith,  "  The  old  is  good  "  ' (! — these  corrections 
and  additions  are  certainly  not  due  to  the  imagination  of  the 
writers,  but  still  less  do  they  prove  that  they  had  made  use 
of  another  account  besides  that  of  Mark.  They  wove  them  in, 
either  from  some  piece  of  oral  tradition  which  seemed  to  them 
more  trustworthy,  or  else  because,  having  read  them  in  some 
other  written  source,  though  in  a  different  connection,  they 
happened  to  call  them  to  mind  by  a  natural  chain  of  thought 
just  at  these  points. 

This  fact,  then,  that  Matthew  and  Luke  drew  about  half 
their  material  exclusively  from  Mark,  can  only  be  denied  by 
those  who  neither  can  nor  will  form  a  true  idea  of  the  way  in 
which  these  Evangelists  went  to  work.  In  their  eyes  Mark 
was  no  sacred  author  whom  they  felt  bound  to  copy  down 
letter  for  letter— to  quote,  as  it  were.  He  belonged  for  them 
to  the  'many'  predecessors  to  whom  Luke  was  consciously 
superior,  and  if  Matthew  knew  of  fewer  such,  he  yet  believed 
that  he  had  something  more  perfect  to  offer  than  they— 
including  Mark — had  produced.  They  gladly  kept  to  the  report 
of  Mark,  whom  they  valued  as  a  well-informed  Evangelist. 
They  followed  him  in  many  very  essential  points,  even  down 
to  his  wording,  and  it  never  occurred  to  them  to  procure 
as  many  other  narratives  as  possible  for  the  verification  or 

1  E.g.,  Mark  ix.  39,  '  for  there  is  no  man  which  shall  do  a  mighty  work  in 
my  name,  and  be  able  quickly  to  speak  evil  of  me.' 

-  E.g.,  Mark  xi.  14:  'And  his  disciples  heurd  it ;  '  xi.  10,  xii.  43:  rwv 
&a.\\6i>Tiav  els  rb  ya£o(f>v\6Kioi',  or  the  note  prefixed  by  Mark,  ra  /j.e\\ovTa  avry 
ffvupaiveii',  to  the  speech  of  Jesus  in  x.  32. 

3  Verse  ix.  9.  '  xii.  11  and  12'.  5  xiv.  5. 

«  Luke  v.  39. 

A  A 


354      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

correction  of  his  reports,  and  perhaps  to  adopt  only  such  pas- 
sages as  did  not  contradict  such  other  sources.  They  related 
quite  freely  and  naively  in  their  own  tone  things  which  they 
had  often  read  in  Mark,  and  they  had  no  more  fear  of  following 
him  too  closely  than  they  had  of  differing  from  him  in  certain 
matters  of  fact.  But  besides  the  narrative  of  Mark,  which 
held  the  first  place  in  their  affections,  they  were  secretly 
influenced  not  only  by  their  own  personal  interests,  affec- 
tions and  literary  peculiarities,  but  also  by  their  education 
and  training,  especially  by  the  Christian  element  therein. 
They  must  have  heard  tales  and  sayings  of  the  Lord  in  other 
ways  as  well — in  the  church  and  in  their  private  social  inter- 
course— and  much  of  this  would  remain  firmly  fixed  in  their 
memories.  It  would  exert  its  influence  on  the  way  in  which 
they  reported  this  or  that  parallel  passage  of  Mark,  and 
sometimes,  since  these  additional  authorities  can  scarcely  all 
have  been  bad,  they  may  have  preserved  for  us  in  their 
rendering  of  Mark,  touches  more  primitive  and  more  original 
than  his. 

5.  But  Matthew  and  Luke  cannot  be  reconstructed  only 
from  Mark  and  a  few  scattered  reminiscences  from  the 
preaching  of  the  Gospel  in  the  church.  They  have  far  too 
extensive  a  body  of  material  in  common  which  is  unknown  to 
Mark,  and  the  literal  agreement  between  them  here  is  per- 
haps still  greater  than  it  was  in  those  passages  which  they 
had  deduced  from  Mark.  In  the  extract  from  the  preaching 
of  the  Baptist !  there  is  scarcely  a  divergency  between  them. 
In  the  story  of  the  temptation  about  half  is  identical  in  each, 
down  to  the  very  *  /cal  so-rrfa-ev  sTrl  TO  Trrepvyiov  rov  ispov.' 2 
The  differences  in  the  two  reports  of  the  parable  of  the  talents 3 
are  much  greater,  but  even  here  there  is  no  lack  of  remarkable 
coincidences,  as  in  the  final  judgment,  '  unto  every  one  that 
hath  shall  be  given,'  and  in  the  antithesis  between  Ospi^suv 
and  o-TTSipsw,  further  back.  In  the  parables  of  the  thief  and 
of  the  faithful  and  unfaithful  stewards,5  the  differences  in 

1  Matt.  iii.  7''-10,  12  ;  Luke  iii.  7M>,  17. 
-   Matt.  iv.  5 ;  Luke  iv.  0. 
1  Matt.  xxv.  14-30  ;  Luke  xix.  11-27. 
1  Matt.  xxiv.  43-51 ;  Luke  xii.  39-48. 


•$  28.]  TJi;:  M.xomc   ri;or,LKM  355 

expression  are  again  scarcely  worth  mentioning,  and  still  more 
astonishing  is  the  agreement  between  Matthew  and  Luke  in 
the  saying  about  the  *  sign  of  the  prophet  Jonah.'  '  The 
short  sayings  of  Jesus,  too,  most  of  which  Matthew  sweeps 
together  into  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  while  Luke  has  them 
scattered  throughout  his  (-Jospel,  are  particularly  interesting. 
Their  literary  relationship  is  obvious  in  nearly  every  case.2 
Moreover,  Matthew  cannot  here  be  regarded  as  the  authority 
of  Luke,  or  Luke  as  the  authority  of  Matthew,  but,  as  we 
might  have  concluded  from  the  observations  made  at  the 
time  of  our  comparison  of  them  with  Mark,  both  are  draw- 
ing from  an  older  source.  In  a  large  number  of  instances 
Luke  appears  as  the  later  amplifier  and  interpreter :  e.g.  in 
ix.  60,  where  he  adds  the  words  *  but  go  thou  and  publish 
abroad  the  kingdom  of  God  '  to  the  saying  of  Matthew,3  *  Leave 
the  dead  to  bury  their  own  dead,'  or  in  vii.  25,  where  he  has 
'  they  which  are  gorgeously  apparelled,  and  live  delicately ,' '' 
instead  of  Matthew's  mere  repetition  of  the  preceding  phrase, 
•  they  that  wear  soft  raiment ' 5 ;  or,  again,  in  the  explanation 
of  the  parable  of  the  son  who  asked  a  loaf  of  his  father,6  where 
he  promises  the  Holy  Spirit  as  the  gift  of  God,  instead  of  the 
'  good  things  '  (dyad d)  of  Matthew.7  But,  on  the  other  hand, 
Luke's  authority  cannot  have  been  Matthew,  for  what  should 
have  induced  him  to  break  up  the  beautiful  grouping  of  the 
latter 's  Sermon  on  the  Mount  and  to  insert  the  fragments  at 
haphazard  here  and  there  ?  And  the  Lord's  Prayer  as  given 
in  Matthew 8  is  to  all  appearances  an  amplification  of  Luke's 
version  9 — for  who  could  credit  Luke  with  an  arbitrary  curtail- 
ment of  it  ?  The  '  quadrans,'  too,  of  Matthew  v.  26,  is  surely 
a  later  touch  compared  to  the  '  mite '  (\STTTOV)  of  Luke  xii.  59, 
and  in  Matt.  vii.  22  the  Logion  of  Luke  xiii.  26  is  simply  taken 
and  modified  to  suit  the  condition  of  a  later  generation.  In  a 

1  Matt.  xii.  39-45  ;  Luke  xi.  29"-32. 

2  E.g.,  Matt.  vii.  11  and  Luke  xi.  13 ;  Matt.  vi.  29  and  Luke  xii.  27b  ;  Matt. 
v.  26  and  Luke  xii.  59 ;  Matt.  xi.  12  fol.  and  Luke  xvi.  16. 

3  viii.  22. 

4  £7raL>x0*"res,   a   word  which,   while    absent   in   Matthew     and    Mark,    is 
thoroughly  characteristic  of  Luke. 

•'  Matt.  xi.  8.  6  Luke  xi.  13.  '  vii.  11.  -  vi.  9-13. 

9  xi.  2-4. 


A    A    ~2 


356       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

vast  number  of  points,  in  short,  we  are  strongly  impressed 
with  the  belief  that  an  old  groundwork  has  been  added  to  now 
by  Matthew  and  now  by  Luke  :  e.g.  in  the  saying  '  For  after  all 
these  things  do  the  Gentiles  seek  '  etc.1  the  words  TOV  KOCT^OV  be- 
side ra  Wvf]  are  certainly  an  addition  of  Luke's,  while  Matthew 
must  have  inserted  o  ovpdvtos  beside  6  Trarrjp  v^wv,  dTrdvr&v 
beside  TOVTWV,  and  xal  rrjv  §iicaioo-vvr]v  beside  rrjv  /3ao-i\stav~ 
Or,  again,  in  the  saying  of  Matt,  xxiii.  23  and  Luke  xi.  42,  the 
'  mint,  dill,  and  cummin '  of  Matthew  looks  older  than  the  '  mint 
and  rue  and  every  herb '  of  Luke,  but,  on  the  other  hand,  Luke's 
'  ye  pass  over  judgment  and  the  love  of  God '  seems  to  deserve 
the  preference  over  Matthew's  modification,  '  ye  have  left 
undone  the  weightier  matters  of  the  law,  judgment  and  mercy 
and  faith  (Trio-ris)' 

The  abundant  use  by  Matthew  and  Luke  of  a  second 
written  authority  besides  Mark  can  scarcely  now  be  denied,  but 
what  sort  of  authority  was  it  ?  Its  name  is  of  no  importance 
(some  call  it  a  Logia  document,  others  an  Apostolic  source), 
but  the  main  question  is,  was  it  a  complete  Gospel  like  that  of 
Mark  ?  The  answer  to  this  question  is  undoubtedly  in  the 
negative,  for  there  appears  no  trace  of  it  in  the  stories  of  the 
Passion  and  the  Resurrection  ;  what  Matthew  and  Luke  tell 
us  there  apart  from  Mark  2  they  certainly  did  not  draw  from 
a  common  document.  Sayings  of  the  Lord,  sometimes  loosely 
attached  to  an  historical  fact,  are  what  Matthew  and  Luke 
derive  thence,  and  their  introductions  of  them  generally  differ 
so  widely  that  one  is  tempted  to  believe  that  this  document 
contained  as  a  rule  no  introductions  at  all.  In  that  case  it 
would  have  been  a  collection  of  the  sayings  of  Jesus,  composed 
without  any  exercise  of  conscious  art,  though  doubtless  not 
without  some  regard  to  the  internal  connection  between  them 
— in  fact,  very  much  what  we  are  led  by  Papias  to  imagine 
that  the  work  of  the  Apostle  Matthew  was.  As  far  as  we  can 
still  reconstruct  this  source  from  Matthew  and  Luke,  it  may 
very  well  have  been  of  Apostolic  origin.  It  must,  however, 

1  Matt.  vi.  32  fol.;  Luke  xii.  30  fol. 

-  E.g.,  Matt,  xxvii.  3-10  and  62-60  (the  repentance  of  Judas  and  the 
guarding  of  the  sepulchre),  and  Luke  xxiii.  10  1:;  (the  conversation  with  the 
malefactor)  and  xxiv.  13-3  (tlu-  disciple.-;  at  F.mmaus). 


§  i>8.]  Tin:  .SYNOPTIC   IMIOHLKM  357 

also  have  contained  the  story  of  the  Temptation,  for  which 
it  is  absolutely  necessary  to  assume  that  Matthew  and  Luke 
possessed  a  written  authority  other  than  Mark,  ;md  also  an 
account  of  the  preaching  of  the  Baptist,  which,  to  judge  from 
Luke  iii.  11-14,  may  even  have  been  more  detailed  than 
that  preserved  in  Matthew.  Would  this  sort  of  material  suit 
a  collection  of  the  Logia  of  Jesus  ?  This  may  be  affirmed 
without  hesitation  in  the  case  of  the  three  temptations,  and, 
in  spite  of  its  legendary  colour,  we  cannot  say  that  the  account 
is  not  such  as  an  original  Apostle  might  have  believed  and 
gladly  transmitted  ;  while  in  the  other  case  it  is  quite  easy 
to  imagine,  considering  the  close  connection  between  the 
preaching  of  Jesus  and  that  of  John,  that  the  document  might 
have  contained  Logia  of  the  Baptist  before  those  of  the 
Messiah.  The  interest  it  shows  later  on  in  the  desert 
preacher — i.e.  in  Matt.  xi.  2-19  and  Luke  vii.  18-35,  a 
passage  where  the  mutual  relationship  of  Jesus  and  John  is 
clearly  brought  out  in  both,  and  which  is  unknown  to  Mark — 
makes  it  very  probable  that  it  had  already  said  something 
about  him  beforehand.  The  only  real  difficulty  is  that  pre- 
sented by  the  story  of  the  centurion  of  Capernaum,  whose 
servant  Jesus  heals  from  a  distance.1  Certain  very  remark- 
able touches  of  Luke's,-  which  he  certainly  did  not  invent, 
are  absent  in  Matthew,  and  altogether  in  the  earlier  part  the 
points  of  contact  between  the  two  are  not  considerable,  but 
from  verse  8  of  Matthew  onwards,  where  the  centurion  speaks 
and  Jesus  addresses  him  and  his  own  followers,  the  literary 
connection  with  Luke  is  unmistakable.  Yet  here  the  two 
Evangelists  were  not  drawing  from  Mark ;  for  to  claim  the 
passage,  purely  for  convenience'  sake,  as  one  originally 
belonging  to  Mark  and  then  accidentally  lost,  is  a  very 
questionable  proposal,  particularly  as  the  tone  of  Matthew 
10-12  is  entirely  that  of  the  other  Logia.  To  presume  a 
third  authority  for  the  sake  of  this  one  passage  is  not  to 
be  commended  either,  and  we  must  therefore  assume  that 
the  writer  of  the  Logia  document,  in  order  to  make  the 
weighty  words  about  the  lack  of  faith  in  Israel  and  the 
many  who  should  '  come  from  the  east  and  the  west  and  sit 

1  Matt.  viii.  5-13  ;  Luke  vii.  1-10  and  xiii.  28  fol.  2  vii.  3-5. 


358       AX    INTRODUCTION    TO    Till-:    NKW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP. 

down  with  Abraham  and  Isaac  and  Jacob  in  the  kingdom 
of  heaven  '  quite  clear,  for  once  related  the  incident  that  gave 
rise  to  them  more  explicitly  than  usual.  This  one  exception 
is  not  enough  to  make  his  book  a  Gospel  like  Matthew's,  a 
counterpart  of  Mark,  for,  as  is  shown  by  another  episode — that 
of  the  man  with  the  withered  hand  ' — it  is  not  always  easy  to 
draw  the  border-line  between  the  words  and  deeds  of  Jesus. 

We  may  say,  then,  that  the  second  authority  used  in  the 
Synoptic  literature  (which  for  convenience'  sake  we  will  call  Q) 
served  the  purpose  of  handing  down  to  posterity  certain 
precious  sayings  of  the  Lord  in  an  authentic  form.  But 
since  it  was  only  reproduced  very  freely  by  Matthew  and 
Luke,  since  its  text  is  very  seldom  quoted  literally  by  them, 
and  since  a  complete  absorption  of  its  contents  into  the  Gospels 
of  the  two  borrowers  is  still  less  to  be  thought  of,  it  is  now 
impossible  to  reconstruct  it.  Its  plan  is  as  little  determi- 
nable  as  its  bulk,  but  it  seems  certain  that  the  author  did  not 
arrange  his  collection  upon  a  chronological  principle,  but 
grouped  it  catechetically  according  to  its  subjects  :  he  wished 
to  illuminate  one  after  the  other  the  main  themes  with  which 
the  teaching  of  the  Church  was  concerned — such  as  prayer, 
confession,  etc. — by  means  of  sayings  of  the  Lord.  Of 
the  character  of  Q  we  can  only  say  that  the  incisive  power 
and  the  unpretending  simplicity  of  the  words  of  Jesus  are 
expressed  in  it  to  perfection.  It  contains  no  signs  of  the 
writer's  having  witnessed  the  destruction  of  Jerusalem,  but  we 

p  assume  from  Matthew  xxiv.  43-51,  and  Luke  xii.  39  fol., 
that  he  had  already  awaited  the  Parusia  for  a  considerable 
time  in  vain.  The  years  between  60  and  70  would  therefore 
seem  the  most  convenient  assignment  for  it. 

The  question  as  to  whether  the  Apostle  Matthew  -  or  some 
other  Christian  familiar  with  the  story  of  Jesus  wrote  down 
this  book  of  Logia  is  of  less  importance  than  that  of  its 
language.  Was  it  written  in  the  Jewish  tongue,  and  was  it 
preserved  unaltered  for  a  considerable  time  ?  Since  the  agree- 
ment between  Matthew  and  Luke  is  so  particularly  close, 
extending  even  to  very  unusual  expressions,  in  the  passages 
they  borrow  from  this  work,  we  are  obliged  to  assume  that 

1  Matt.  xii.  9-14;  Luke  xi\.  1   HI.  *  See  p.  307. 


if  i'S.  TIM;  SYNOPTIC  PKOHLUM  3~)() 

they  used  a  Greek  translation  of  Q  as  their  common  source. 
Its  Aramaic  substratum  is  unmistakable,  for  in  Matt.  xi.  17, 
for   instance,    the   words    oDp^)ja-aa-6s — sKo-^raa-Os   rest   upon 
an  Aramaic  word-play  of  raqedton  and  arqedton.]     And  to 
niy  mind  the  question  is  settled  by  the  fact  that  whereas 
Luke  in  one  of  the  '  Woes '  on  the   scribes  and   Pharisees 
has    '  Give  for  aim*   that  which  is  within,'  Matthew  readn 
*  Cleanse  first   the   inside  '  etc.,  a  variant  which  is  incon- 
ceivable as  coming  from  the   Greek,    but  perfectly  natural 
if  founded  upon  an  Aramaic  original,  in  which  the  words  in 
question,  zakki  and  dakki,  might  easily  have  been  confused. 
The   substitution  of  alms-giving   for   cleansing   is   certainly 
characteristic  of  the  taste  of  Luke,  but  even  apart  from  the 
fact   that  he  probably   did   not   understand   Aramaic,    it   is 
impossible  to  attribute  to  him  the  translation  of  Q  into  Greek. 
The  facts  would  best  be  accounted  for  by  assuming  that  Q 
was  originally  an  Aramaic  document  composed  by  Matthew 
between  the  years  60  and  70,  that  it  was  shortly  afterwards 
translated  into  Greek,  and  that  several  different  versions  of 
this  translation  were  produced,  some  of  which  made  correc- 
tions in  it  (like  the  icaOdpiorov  of  Matt,  xxiii.  26)  according 
to   a   better    reading  of  the  Aramaic  text,    others   inserted 
supplementary  matter,  and  others  again  made  arbitrary  or 
formal  alterations.     Wernle  (who,  by  the  way,  does  not  regard 
Matthew  as  the  author  of  Q,  though  he  does  attribute  it  to 
some  member  of  the  original  Apostolic  circle ;  and  believes  that 
not  Aramaic,  but  Greek,  was  its  original  language)  puts  down 
to  one  of  these  revisers  all  the  Judaistic  elements  in  Matthew's 
borrowings    from   Q   (examples   of  which,   in   their   pristine 
crudity,  he  professes  to  recognise  in  v.  17-20,  x.  5  fol.  and 
xxiii.    3).     He  is  certainly  right  not   to   regard  the   general 
tone  of  Q  as  Judaistic,  but,  on  the  contrary,  to  see  in  it  the 
truest  witness  to  the  free  and  almost  revolutionary  Gospel  of 
Jesus  himself.     But  it  is  not  likely  that  the  Judaistic  inter- 
polations  in  Q  should   have  sprung  from  a  later  hand  ;  in 
so  far  as  they  are  not  really  genuine  words  of   Jesus  the}' 
might  far   rather   have   been  fragments  of  the  tradition   of 
the  Primitive  Community  concerning  him ;  the  author  of  Q, 

1  Of.  Matt.  xii.  41  fol.  and  Luke  xi.  31  fol. 


360       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  i. 

no  less  than  Matthew  or  Luke,1  put  another  meaning  upon 
them,  and  was  not  afraid  of  their  misuse  in  the  interests  of 
party  strife. 

On  the  other  hand,  an  Ebionite  version  of  Q  has  been  traced 
by  some  in  those  passages  of  Luke  which,  as  is  proved  by  their 
parallels  in  Matthew— e.g.  by  the  Beatitudes  and  '  Woes,'  to 
quote  the  first  examples — are  derived  from  this  document, 
but  take  a  far  stronger  tinge  of  hostility  to  the  world  and  its 
pleasures  in  Luke's  case  than  in  Matthew's.  Additions  of  this 
kind,  considering  the  growing  inclination  of  the  Church  in 
this  direction,  may  well  have  been  the  work  of  some  reviser, 
just  as  they  evidently  suit  the  taste  of  Luke.  But  in  them 
also  a  large  part  of  the  most  genuine  matter  we  possess  from 
the  mouth  of  Jesus  may  still  linger  ;  for  the  truth  is  that 
Jesus  bore  within  himself  something  both  of  the  Judaist  and 
of  the  Ebionite,  just  as  traces  of  both  tendencies  may  be 
found  in  Matthew  and  in  Luke.  I  shall  not  venture  to 
trace  the  development  of  Q  in  detail  as  far  as  its  final 
disappearance  within  the  Canonical  Gospels ;  but  it  is  safe 
to  assert  that  its  course  was  chequered  by  not  a  few  vicissi- 
tudes. 

6.  If  we  have  here  been  able  to  acknowledge  the  truth 
that  lies  in  the  hypotheses  of  Dependence  and  an  Original 
Gospel,  we  may  now  point  out  what  is  sound  in  the  Tradi- 
tion- and  Fragment-hypotheses.  Owing  to  the  possession  of 
collateral  authorities,  we  are  in  a  position  to  know  where 
Matthew  and  Luke  followed  Mark  and  where  they  used  the 
Logia  collection.  But  there  still  remain  large  sections — 
nearly  a  quarter  of  Matthew  and  Luke — which  have  no 
parallel  anywhere  else  :  part  of  these  might  of  course  still 
be  derived  from  the  '  Original  Matthew,1  for  just  as  Matthew 
and  Luke  constantly  differ  in  their  selections  from  Mark,  so 
it  must  have  been  with  their  treatment  of  the  other  authority. 
In  the  '  Woes '  against  the  Pharisees  especially,  there  are 
many  things  peculiar  to  Matthew  which  convey  the  same 
tone  as  those  which  he  shares  with  Luke,  and  we  might 
also  instance  the  saying  about  the  eunuchs,-  or  that  about 

'  Esp.  xvi.  17.  'But  it  is  easier  for  heaven  ami  earth  to  puss  away  thini 
for  one  tittle  of  the  Law  to  fail.'  -  Matt.  xix.  10-12. 


§28.]  Till:    SYNOPTIC   PROBM-IM 

the  right  way  to  pray,1  or  Luke's  *I  came  to  cast  fire  upon 
the  earth,  and  what  will  I,  if  it  is  already  kindled  ?  '  which 
suit  the  tenor  of  the  Logia  document  to  perfection.  But  it 
would  be  a  hopeless  task  to  try  and  decide  how  far  its 
influence  extended  over  Matthew  and  Luke,  when  we  can  no 
longer  control  the  one  by  the  other.  Certain  it  is  that  in  both 
may  be  found  materials  which  they  must  have  drawn  from 
sources  otherwise  quite  indefinable.  The  Birth-stories  etc., 
in  both,2  the  picture  of  the  Day  of  Judgment  in  Matthew/1  the 
above-mentioned  additions  in  the  last  three  chapters,  and  espe- 
cially Luke's  insertions  of  the  stories  of  Zacchaeus,1  of  the  Sama- 
ritan village,5  and  of  Mary  and  Martha,6  the  parable  of  Dives 
and  Lazarus  7  (which  he  had  himself  received  in  a  version  that 
altered  its  original  point),  and  also  his  mention  of  the  minis- 
tering women,8  all  bear  a  particular  stamp,  and  must  have 
had  their  special  origin.  Much  of  all  this  is  manifestly  the 
legendary  product  of  later  times,  like  the  story  of  Judas,  the 
guarding  of  the  sepulchre,  the  appearance  to  the  two  disciples 
at  Emmaus  9  and  practically  everything  in  the  first  chapters  of 
both  Luke  and  Matthew.  As  a  rule,  the  object  of  each  story 
is  unmistakable :  that  of  the  guarding  of  the  sepulchre,  for 
instance/0  arose  out  of  the  desire  to  refute  and  retaliate  upon 
the  slander  spread  by  the  Jews  that  the  disciples  of  Jesus 
had  stolen  his  body  in  order  to  proclaim  him  risen  from  the 
tomb.  But  I  doubt  whether  the  Evangelists  who  have 
preserved  these  narratives  for  us  were  also  their  creators  ; 
however  unmistakable  is  the  hand  of  Matthew  in  i.  22  fol., 
for  instance,  or  in  ii.  5  fol.,  it  is  not  likely  that  he  would  have 
invented  these  occurrences  himself  merely  in  order  to  bring 
in  the  words  of  a  prophecy ;  he  would  rather  have  made  use 
of  fragments  of  tradition — probably  oral — which  had  crossed 
his  path,  and  subjected  them,  though  with  still  greater 
freedom  than  he  had  shown  in  dealing  with  written  material, 
to  his  own  ideas  and  his  own  design.  The  genealogy  of 
Jesus,  with  which  Matthew  opens  his  Gospel,  serves  a  wholly 

1  Matt.  vi.  5-8. 

2  Matt.  i.  and  ii. ;  Luke  i.  and  ii.  3  Matt.  xxv.  31-46. 
4  Luke  xix.  1-10.                 5  Luke  ix.  51-56.                 fi  Luke  x.  38-42. 

7  xvi.  19-31.  »  Luke  viii.  1-3.  9  Luke  xxiv.          10  Matt,  xxvii. 


362       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

different  purpose,  after  all,  from  that  of  the  story  of  his 
miraculous  birth,  which  follows  immediately  upon  it,  and  are 
we  to  suppose  that  Matthew  invented  both  of  these  side  by 
side  ?  The  anecdote  of  the  payment  of  the  half-shekel  by 
Jesus  and  Peter — which  Matthew  alone  preserves  l — ends 
with  a  very  legendary  touch,  but  I  cannot  believe  that  it  has 
no  foundation  in  fact.  The  miracle  of  the  fish  is  connected 
so  superficially  with  a  story  otherwise  fully  worthy  of  Jesus, 
that  if  Matthew — in  order  to  demonstrate  the  political  loyalty 
of  the  Christians ! — had  composed  it,  he  would  indeed  have 
surpassed  himself.  His  method  as  a  writer  and  his  '  tenden- 
cies '  would  naturally  gain  the  upper  hand  more  easily  when 
he  was  telling  some  edifying  legend  that  he  had  never  seen 
written  down  than  when  he  was  merely  following  a  written 
authority  ;  but  it  is  only  necessary  to  compare  Matthew  with 
the  apocryphal  Gospels  of  later  times  in  order  to  realise  the 
absurdity  of  the  idea  that  he  was  at  the  same  time  a  daring 
inventor  of  Logia  or  evangelic  narrative,  and  a  faithful 
copyist  of  existing  written  materials. 

The  same  may  be  said  of  Luke.  It  is  true  that  he  has 
some  independent  invention  ;  he  alone  is  probably  responsible 
for  the  bringing  in  of  Herod  into  the  trial  of  Jesus :  kings 
and  governors  (ftaaiXsls  /cal  rjye/jiovss)  were  to  attest  the 
innocence  of  Jesus  in  order  that  now,  at  the  time  when  Luke 
wrote,  the  innocence  of  Christians  might  be  demonstrated 
before  the  same  tribunals  with  greater  vraisemblance.  But 
then,  again,  he  evidently  owes  the  episode  of  the  disciples  of 
Ernmaus,  with  its  Aramaicisrns  and  its  reference  to  an 
appearance  to  Peter'2  (which  the  author  himself  certainly 
did  not  mean  to  make),  to  another  hand  ;  while  his  story  of 
the  Birth  and  Childhood  is  so  distinct  in  style  from  the  rest 
of  the  Gospel  that  it  cannot  be  explained  without  assuming 
a  different  written  authority  for  it.  The  exact  personal 
information  of  viii.  1-3  must  of  course  also  have  been 
founded  on  documentary  reports,  and  in  any  case  how 
could  one  seriously  believe  that  Luke  should  wilfully  have 
made  use  of  only  two  of  the  many  predecessors  whose 

xvii.  24-27.  *  xx 


$  28.]  TIIK    SYNOPTIC    I'KOHLKM 

existence  he  was  aware  of  ?  His  first  two  chapters  might 
have  heen  in  circulation  by  themselves  among  Christian 
communities  a  '  Fragment,'  in  Schleiermacher's  sense — and 
it  is  possible,  too,  that  he  may  have  known  and  made  use  of  a 
collection  of  parables,  to  which  we  owe  the  beautiful  allegories 
of  the  Prodigal  Son,  of  the  lost  piece  of  silver,  of  the  unjust 
judge,  of  the  Pharisee  and  the  Publican,  and  of  the  Good 
Samaritan.  According  to  his  own  prologue  Luke  took  great 
pains  over  the  collection  of  his  material  ;  but  this  would 
indeed  be  an  empty  boast  if  he  had  merely  made  a  patch- 
work composition  out  of  two  original  works  of  considerable 
bulk,  which  were  certainly  accessible  to  many  of  his  readers, 
and  had  adorned  it  with  a  succession  of  his  own  inventions. 
It  is  probable,  on  the  contrary,  that  he  procured  as 
many  records  as  possible  (d7rofj,vrjfiovsvpara),  but  he  would 
also  have  gone  round  among  the  elders  listening  to  their 
tales,  in  the  manner  of  Papias,  and  he  was  proud  of  having 
secured  a  far  more  complete  Gospel  in  this  way  than  any 
others  known  to  him.  Matthew's  procedure  also  must  have 
been  very  similar  to  this,  except  that,  as  a  rule,  he  did  not 
obtain  access  to  the  same  witnesses  and  evidence  as  Luke. 
Occasionally,  of  course,  he  may  even  have  done  this,  or  he 
may  have  heard  such  parables  as  those  of  the  talents,1  or 
the  marriage-feast,-  by  word  of  mouth,  like  Luke,  who  gives 
a  remarkably  different  version  of  them.3  Or,  again,  one 
of  them  may  have  drawn  from  oral  tradition  what  the  other 
already  possessed  in  a  written  form.  It  is  impossible  to  say 
more  on  this  point,  except  perhaps  that  Luke  seems  to  recur 
more  constantly  to  written  authorities  than  Matthew.  But 
to  assume  a  special  '  Ebionite '  source  for  Luke  is  quite 
unwarranted,  because  the  Ebionite  colouring  pervades  the 
whole  of  his  Gospel  from  beginning  to  end,  and  is  just  as 
noticeable  in  the  material  he  took  from  Mark  and  from 
the  Logia  document  as  in  what  he  borrowed  from  anonymous 
sources. 

7.  Two  questions  still  remain  unanswered,  even  for  those 
who,  without  accepting  our  proposed  solution  of  the  Synoptic 

1  xxv.  14-30.  2  xxii.  1-14. 

s  xix.  11-27,  xiv.  15-24. 


364       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT       [CHAP.  i. 

problem  as  a  piece  of   new   *  dogma,'  may  yet  feel  it  to  be 
relatively  the   most  probable — i.e.  first,  that  of  the  mutual 
relationship  between  the  two  main  authorities  (Mark  and  Q) 
used  by  Matthew  and  Luke,  and,  secondly,  that  of  the  relation 
of  these  two  Gospels  to  each  other.    According  to  the  tradition, 
of  course,  Mark  wrote  from  memory  alone,  merely  reproducing 
the  substance  of  Petrine  lessons.     And,  on  the  other  hand,  it 
goes  without  saying  that  the  man  of  the  primitive  Apostolic 
age  to  whom  we  owe  the  epoch-making  collection  of  Sayings 
of  the  Lord,  would  not  have  used  as  his  main  authority  a 
book  so  unproductive  for  his  purpose  as  Mark,  even  granted 
that  he  knew  Greek  and  was  acquainted  with  the  Gospel  in 
question.     The  contrary  would  be  by  no  means  so  improbable, 
in  spite  of  the  tradition.     Professor  Weiss  does  in  fact  assert 
that   several   passages   common   to   all   three  Synoptics  are 
derived  from  this  '  Apostolic  authority,'  so  that  occasionally 
of  course  Matthew  or  Luke  might  have  preserved  it  in  a  more 
faithful  form  than  the  older  Mark.     The  proofs  he  adduces 
in  support  of  this  theory  from  a  number  of  narratives  l  (for 
he  regards  the  authority,  not  as  a  mere  collection  of  Logia, 
but  as  a  true  Gospel,  though  one  which,  curiously  enough, 
possessed   no   ending)    are   not   very   convincing ;  and  even 
where  the  sayings  of  Jesus  seem  to  bear  a  more  primitive 
stamp  in  Matthew  or  Luke,  we  can  always  explain  this  by 
the  fact  that  many  of  them  must  have  been  widely  known 
throughout   Christendom  long  before  Mark  was  written,    so 
that  even  a  copyist  of  Mark  might  by  trusting  his  memory  have 
handed  down  some  things  in  a  more  primitive  form  than 
Mark  himself.     But  no  one  will  doubt  that  certain  words  of 
Jesus,  like  the  parable  of  the  sower  in  Mark  iv.,  or  a  great 
deal  of  the  eschatological  discourse  in  Mark  xiii.,  were  already 
contained  in   the   Logia  document,  for  the  idea  that  Mark 
never  coincided  with  anything  in  the  other  authority,  that 
none  of  the  Logia  he  preserves  found  entrance  into  Q,  is  wholly 
unintelligible.     If   Q   obtained    recognition   very   rapidly   in 
Christian  circles,  it  is  surely  most  natural  to  suppose  that  in 

1  E.g.,  from  that  of  the  man  sick  of  the  palsy,  Mark  ii.  1  etc. ;  from  the 
feeding  of  the  five  thousand,  Mark  vi.  35  etc.,  and  from  the  healing  of  the  blind 
man,  Mark  x.  46  etc. 


§  28.]  TIIK    SYNOITIC    I'KOKLK.M  365 

those  sections  which  were  common  to  both,  Mark's  narrative 
would  have  been  moulded  under  its  influence.     Moreover  the 
remarkably  small  space  which  is  granted  in  his  Gospel  to  the 
words  of  Jesus,  rather  leaves  the  impression  that  the  writer 
did  not  attempt  any  completeness  in  that  respect, — an  idea 
which,  considering  the  enormous  value  which  every  syllable 
from   the   lips  of   Jesus  possessed,  would  only   be   possible 
on  the  supposition  that  the  propagation  of  the  Lord's  sayings 
had  already  been  provided  for.     Mark  did  not  write  his  Gospel 
as   a   supplement  to  the  Logia   document,  but  as  an  inde- 
pendent work  ;    still,  this  does  not  make  it  impossible  that 
he  half  unconsciously  took  his  predecessor  into  account.     It 
is,  however,  not  conclusively  proved  that  Mark  had  any  written 
authorities,  more  particularly  the  '  genuine  Matthew,'  before 
him   when   he  wrote.     This   would  only  be  demonstrable  if 
Matthew  and  Luke,  in  passages  which  were  connected  with 
undoubted  portions  of  the  earlier  authority,  but  which  were 
also  to  be  found  in  Mark,  agreed  with  one  another  against 
Mark  so  often  as  to  exclude  all  idea  of  chance,  and  moreover 
presented  a  text  which  was  obviously  more  primitive  than  his, 
so  that  Mark's  motive  in  '  emendating '  it  would  become  ap- 
parent.    This  case,  however,  does  not  exist,  so  that  we  cannot 
get   beyond  hypotheses.     Luke   xvii.    2   certainly   gives   the 
saying  about  *  causing  one  of  these  little  ones  to  stumble '  in  a 
more  primitive  form  than  Mark  ix.  42  or  Matthew  xviii.  6,  and 
yet  in  language  so  similar  to  Mark's  that  we  are  tempted  to 
believe  Luke's  version  to  have  been  identical  with  Q,  which 
was  then  used  as  the  foundation  for  Mark  and  through  Mark 
for  Matthew  ;  but  might  not  Luke's  text  just  as  well  have 
been  a  combination  of  Mark  and  Q  ? 

In  cases  where  similar  observations  may  be  made  on 
narrative  portions  which  cannot  be  referred  to  Q,  (e.g.  that 
a  sentence  of  Mark's,  in  opposition  to  the  great  majority  of 
data  to  the  contrary,  occasionally  seems  to  be  dependent 
upon  Matthew  or  Luke  and  to  represent  the  later  version) 
the  hypothesis  has  been  started  of  an  Original  Mark,  which 
is  supposed  to  have  undergone  a  more  thorough  revision  in 
accordance  with  later  standards  than  either  Matthew  or  Luke, 
so  that  in  its  canonical  form  it  might  sometimes  appear 


oG6       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  I. 

as  the  later  version  beside  its  Synoptic  parallels.  It  is  true 
that  Mark  gives  the  saying  of  the  '  unforgivable  sin  '  in  a  later 
form  than  the  other  two  1  ;  he  alone  ventures  no  longer  in 
the  case  of  blasphemy  against  the  Son  of  Man  to  give  an 
express  promise  of  forgiveness.  Matthew's  version,  again, 
of  the  saying  'I  will  not  drink  henceforth  of  this  fruit  of 
the  vine  until  the  day  when  I  drink  it  new  with  you  (psO* 
vp&v)  in  my  Father's  kingdom ' 2  seems  more  primitive  than 
Mark's, ;  where  the  words  '  with  you '  have  disappeared  (Luke's 
version  is  still  more  modern  in  tone) ;  but  this  verdict  can 
only  be  applied  to  individual  words  or  sentences  in  Mark, 
never  to  a  complete  passage,  so  that  the  data  are  insufficient 
to  bear  out  this  hypothesis  of  an  Original  Mark.  The  bad 
state  in  which  the  text  of  Mark  has  been  handed  down  to  us 
warns  us  to  be  careful,  and  it  is  always  possible  that  in  the 
case  of  material  so  widely  known  as  this,  the  writer  drawing 
from  an  earlier  source  may  sometimes  have  corrected  it 
from  knowledge  gained  elsewhere,  and  so  may  even  offer  us  a 
text  identical  with  that  from  which  his  model's  had  arisen, 
perhaps  through  mere  misunderstanding. 

8.  Of  the  many  l  subsidiary '  authorities  used  by  Luke, 
Matthew  may  have  been  one— provided,  that  is,  that  Matthew 
was  the  earlier  of  the  two,  which  has,  however,  not  yet  been 
proved.1  It  is  certainly  safe  to  say  that  if  Matthew  was  in 
existence  at  the  time  when  Luke  wrote,  the  Third  Evangelist 
could  scarcely  have  overlooked  so  brilliant  a  work  in  the 
course  of  his  laborious  researches,  still  less  have  deliberately 
left  it  unused,  presumably  out  of  some  dislike  he  bore  to  it. 
Moreover  Matthew  and  Luke  coincide  in  a  few  points  where 
Mark  and  the  Logia  document  no  longer  serve  as  authorities  : 
both,  for  instance,  add  to  the  mocking  cry  '  Prophesy  ! '  of 
Mark  xiv.  65  the  words  '  who  is  he  that  struck  thee  '  — 
both  give  the  words  e&irei  sv/caipiav  G  (of  Judas)  where  Mark 
contents  himself  with  an  S^TSI  .  .  .  sv/calpcos  ;  the  simile  of  the 
lightning,  which  both  employ — though  in  different  ways— i 

1  Mark  iii.  28  fol. ;  Matt.  xii.  31  fol. ;  Luke  xii.  10. 

Matt.  xxvi.  '-".I.  J  xiv.  25. 

*  See  pp.  *  Malt.  xxvi.  OS  ;  Luke  xxii.  64. 

1    Matt.  xxvi.  10;  Luke  xxii.  0. 


§  28.]  THI-:  SYNOPTIC  n;or,L!-:.\] 

describing  the  angel  who  guards  the  sepulchre,1  is  absent 
from  Mark,  and  a  few  lines  before  2  both  use  the  by  no  means 
common  word  sTri<f>wa-iceiv  to  denote  the  earliest  dawning  of  the 
day  (though  in  Luke  that  day  is  the  Sabbath  and  in  Matthew 
the  first  day  of  the  week).  In  the  Birth-story  the  words  of 
Matt.  i.  21, '  she  shall  bring  forth  a  son  and  thou  shalt  call  his 
name  Jesus,'  are  almost  identical  in  Luke.3  Some  have  even 
thought  they  could  discover  in  Luke  original  passages  of 
Matthew's  own  composition,  and  this  would  constitute  a  proof. 
But  it  is  impossible  to  tell  what  was  Matthew's  own  composi- 
tion and  where  he  was  drawing  from  oral  or  written  tradition, 
and  in  some  cases  his  authorities  may  have  been  equally  ac- 
cessible to  Luke.  In  any  case  the  latter  did  not  pay  very 
much  attention  to  Matthew  ;  he  tells  quite  a  different  Birth- 
story,  and  varies  from  him  almost  as  much  in  the  last  three 
chapters.  All  we  can  definitely  say  is,  that  the  points  of 
agreement  between  Matthew  and  Luke  in  passages  which 
both  draw  from  the  same  source  only  extend  further  than  the 
substance  of  that  source  in  minor  details  which  both  might 
have  hit  upon  independently,  and  that  the  turns  of  phrase 
characteristic  of  Matthew's  own  hand  cannot  be  proved  to 
exist  in  Luke.  Thus  it  is  not  very  ijrobable  that  Luke  was 
acquainted  with  Matthew  as  one  of  the  '  many,'  nor  that 
Matthew  made  use  of  Luke.  In  my  opinion,  both  took  up 
their  pens  more  or  less  simultaneously,  each  unaware  of  the 
other's  work,  and  both  actuated  essentially  by  the  same  motive, 
i.e.  that  of  bestowing  a  Gospel  upon  the  Church  which  should 
at  once  be  complete,  and  well  adapted  both  to  refute  unjust 
accusations  from  outside  and  to  edify  the  believers  them- 
selves. The  employment  of  the  same  main  authorities  by 
both  is  the  strongest  proof  of  the  fact  that,  in  spite  of 
Luke  i.  1,  the  choice  was  limited,  and  the  connecting  links 
between  the  two  great  Synoptists  and  the  events  which  they 
described  fragile  and  precarious.  They  appeared  just  in  time 
to  save  some  portion  of  the  old  inheritance. 

1  Matt,  xxviii.  3;  Luke  xxiv.  4.  -  Matt,  xxviii.  1  ;  Luke  xxiii.  54. 

3  i.  31. 


o68       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP. 


§  29.  The  Historical  Value  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels 

[For  the  literature  of  the  subject  see  supra,  §§  23-27.     Alg 
A.  Besch,  'Agrapha,'  and  '  Ausserkanonische  Paralleltexte  zu  dei 
Bvangelien,'  in  '  Texte  und  Untersuchungen,'  v.  4  (1889),  x.  1- 
(1893-6).  J.  H.  Eopes,  '  Die  Spriiche  Jesu,'  in  '  Texte  und  Unter- 
suchungen,' xiv.  2  (1896),  a  critical  revision  of  the  material  which 
had  been  brought  together  with  prodigious  industry,  but  not  sifted, 
by  Besch.     A.  Besch,  '  Die  Logia  Jesu  nach  dem  griech.  und  hebr. 
Texte  wiederhergestellt '  (1898).     At  the  same  time  appeared  the 
edition  of  the  Hebrew  text  yw  n:n>  rVPIDn  y\W  nnbin  ISO  which 
was  the  crown  of  the  fantastic  edifice  erected  by  Besch's  brain.] 

1.  Since  it  is  not  for  their  own  sake,  but  for  that  of  the  sto] 
which  they  tell,  that  we  prize  the  Synoptics  so  highly,  the 
most  important  question,  after  all,  is  how  far  they  will  serv< 
in  the  reconstruction  of  the  life  of  Jesus, — what  is  their  value 
as  historical  documents.  This,  it  may  be  said  at  once,  is  nol 
unlimited.  In  any  case,  the  narrative  of  the  Synoptists  can- 
not be  called  complete  ;  Mark  did  not  even  aim  at  making 
his  work  complete,  nor  could  we  fail  to  believe  (even  if 
we  had  no  knowledge  of  the  many  profound  and  probably 
genuine  words  of  Jesus  which  have  come  down  to  us  through 
non-Canonical  literature)  that  what  the  Synoptists  have  pre- 
served to  us  is  only  a  fractional  part  of  all  that  Jesus  must  hav< 
said  and  done  during  his  Ministry.  Their  material  is  not 
sufficient  to  delineate  even  the  outlines  of  the  life  of  Jesus, 
except  where  a  fruitful  imagination  ventures  to  supply  the 
missing  indications  as  to  the  date  or  occasion  of  individual 
occurrences,  or  the  connection  between  them.  But  it  is  not 
only  that  the  Synoptics  know  far  less  than  we  could  wish 
about  Jesus :  what  they  know  and  tell  is  a  mixture  of 
truth  and  poetry.  The  sayings  they  report  in  absolutely 
identical  form — apart  from  possible  variations  in  translation — 
would  not  take  long  to  count,  and  wherever  we  can  observe 
their  methods  we  see  how  little  they  valued  strict  accuracy 
in  the  reproduction  of  their  authorities,  and  how  fully  they 
felt  themselves  justified  in  treating  the  details  with  literary 
freedom,  now  curtailing  and  now  amplifying  them.  The 


P* 

! 


§  29.]    THE  HISTORICAL  VALUE  OP  THE  SYNOPTIC  GOSPELS    369 

fear  of  impairing  historical  truth  was  evidently  unknown  to 
them.  Even  if  the  remarkably  different  versions  of  the 
parable  of  the  marriage-feast,1  for  instance,  did  not  compel 
us  to  assume  that  one  of  the  narrators  at  least  deliberately 
modified  the  original  version,  the  hand  of  the  reporter  is  un- 
mistakable in  countless  cases  where  the  sayings  of  Jesus  are 
concerned.  So  improbable  a  touch  as  that  of  Matt.  xxii.  6, 
where  the  guests  who  are  bidden  to  the  banquet  by  the  King, 
but  who  refuse  to  come,  lay  hold  on  his  servants  and  kill 
them,  was  certainly  not  introduced  into  the  parable  by  its 
original  author,  but  by  the  Evangelist,  who,  in  his  eagerness 
for  interpretation,  was  not  thinking  of  ordinary  guests,  but  of 
the  Jews  who  persecuted  the  Lord's  Apostles.  Mark  iv. 
10-12  and  34  may  serve  to  show  how  misunderstandings  of 
many  kinds  could  also  injure  the  tradition ;  here  Jesus 
describes  the  perverseness  of  the  people  as  the  reason  for  his 
speaking  in  parables,  whereas  according  to  the  most  natural 
interpretation  of  iv.  33  he  was  actuated  by  the  opposite  and 
only  credible  motive — that  of  speaking  in  similes  because  he 
could  in  that  way  be  better  heard  and  understood. 

In  Mark  xi.2  we  are  told  that  when  Jesus  was  on  his  way 
from  Bethany  to  Jerusalem  he  sought  fruit  from  a  fig-tree  in 
vain  and  therefore  cursed  the  tree,  and  that  as  his  disciples 
passed  by  with  him  again  the  next  morning  they  found  it 
withered  to  the  root.  Matthew  also  relates  the  incident,3  but 
postpones  Jesus'  curse  till  the  day  after  the  cleansing  of  the 
temple,  while  in  Mark  it  had  taken  place  before  it ;  thus  in 
Matthew  the  withering  of  the  tree  occurs  immediately,  to  the 
astonishment  of  the  disciples.  Is  it  possible  to  deny  a  tend- 
ency towards  the  increase  of  the  marvellous  in  this  example  ? 
Mark's  anecdote  of  the  feeding  of  the  four  thousand  4  is  a  mere 
duplicate  of  that  of  the  feeding  of  the  five  thousand  which  he 
had  told  just  before "' ;  the  parallelism  between  the  two  is  so 
far-reaching  that  no  other  explanation  is  even  arguable, — the 
one  version  simply  arose  through  exaggeration  of  the  other. 
In  the  one  case  four  thousand  persons  after  three  days'  fasting 
are  fed  with  seven  loaves  and  a  few  fishes,  and  leave  seven 

1  Matt.  xxii.  1  etc. ;  Luke  xiv.  16  etc.  -  Vv.  12-14  and  19-22. 

3  xxi.  18-21.  4  viii.  1  etc.  5  vi.  34  etc. 

B  U 


370       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TKSTAMKXT       [CHAP.  i. 

basketfuls  of  broken  pieces  over,  and  in  the  other,  five  thou- 
sand men  (Matthew  expressly  adding  '  beside  women  and 
children  ')  are  fed  with  five  loaves  and  two  fishes,  leaving 
twelve  basketfuls  of  broken  pieces.  Again,  the  story  of  Jesus 
walking  on  the  sea  L  is  a  kind  of  Docetic  exaggeration  of 
the  beautiful  tale  of  his  stilling  the  storm,'2  while  the  in- 
stance brought  forward  by  all  three  Synoptists,  but  most 
complacently  by  Mark,3  of  his  power  over  demons — that  of  the 
Gerasene  swine — is  nothing  but  the  purest  legend.  Jesus  is 
represented  as  having  met  '  a  man  with  an  unclean  spirit '  (or 
two,  according  to  Matthew  4)  in  the  country  of  the  Gerasenes, 
from  whom  he  expelled  a  legion  of  devils  ;  these,  however,  he 
allowed  to  enter  into  a  herd  of  two  thousand  swine  which 
were  feeding  close  at  hand,  and  which  then  immediately 
rushed  down  the  steep  into  the  sea — to  the  consternation,  as 
may  well  be  imagined,  of  the  much  injured  owners.  Mark 
and  Matthew  give  us  but  one  instance  of  a  raising  from  the 
dead — that  of  the  daughter  of  Jairus  "' — but  Luke  also  tells 
that  of  the  widow's  son  at  Nain,6  placing  it  before  the  other,7 
and  the  older  Evangelists  would  certainly  not  have  passed 
over  so  edifying  and  convincing  a  miracle  as  this  of  their  own 
free  will.  In  any  case  the  public  raising  from  the  dead  at  Nain 
cannot,  with  Luke,  be  placed  earlier  than  the  secret  one  in  the 
house  of  Jairus,  but  should  probably  be  regarded  as  a  later 
growth  after  the  type  of  the  primitive  Jairus  miracle.  The 
Birth-story  of  Matthew  (and  still  more  certainly  that  of  Luke) 
is  wholly  and  entirely  the  work  of  pious  fancy,  and  if  in  the 
relatively  exact  account  of  Jesus'  last  suffering  and  death  we 
may  reasonably  expect  particular  trustworthiness — for  who 
could  possibly  have  invented  the  story  of  the  denial  of  Peter/ 
for  instance,  or  the  cry  of  Jesus  on  the  Cross,  *  My  G 
my  God,  why  hast  thou  forsaken  me  ? ' !t — yet  even  h 
and  in  the  oldest  source,  the  legendary  elements  are  no 
lacking,  such  as  the  statements  about  the  darkness  that 
covered  the  whole  land,  and  the  rending  of  the  veil  of  the 


Mark  vi.  45  etc. 
viii.  28. 
vii.  11-17. 
Mark  xiv.  66  etc. 


-  Murk  iv.  35  etc. 
5  Mark  v.  22  etc. ; 
7  viii.  40  etc. 
Mark  xv.  34. 


»  v.  1-20. 
Matt.  5x.  18  etc. 


§29.]    THE  HISTORICAL  VALUE  OF  THE  SYNOl'TIC  GOSI'KI.S    371 

temple.1  Fresh  touches  were  of  course  continually  being 
added,  like  that  of  the  guarding  of  the  sepulchre  -  (which 
tended  to  assist  the  belief  in  the  Kesurrection),  or  like 
the  words  of  Jesus  on  the  Cross  as  given  by  Luke,  '  Father, 
forgive  them,'  etc.,  or  the  few  words  to  the  malefactor — those 
infinitely  touching  illustrations  of  a  love  which,  even  in  the 
midst  of  death,  sought  only  to  excuse  its  tormentors,  and 
held  itself  open  to  the  anguished  prayer  of  the  meanest 
sinner. 

By  far  the  greater  part  of  this  material,  the  authenticity  of 
which  is  more  than  doubtful,  was  not  invented  by  the  Synop- 
tists,  but  was  derived  by  them  from  oral  or  written  authorities. 
They  themselves  were  generally  responsible  only  for  the  form, 
in  the  arrangement  of  which  they  certainly  exhibited  consider- 
able freedom,  though  always  in  the  full  belief  that  they  were 
able  to  reproduce  the  traditional  material  more  effectively  than 
anyone  else  had  done  before  them.  It  is  true  that  they  did 
not  apply  historical  criticism  to  the  materials  they  used,  but 
if  they  had,  no  Gospels  would  have  been  written,  and  their 
artificial  productions  would  have  fallen  into  oblivion  a  few 
decades  after  they  appeared.  Edification  was  for  them  the 
standard  of  credibility  ;  their  task  was,  not  to  understand  and 
estimate  the  historical  Jesus,  but  to  believe  in  him,  to  love 
him  above  all  else,  to  teach  men  to  hope  in  him :  they  did 
not  describe  the  Jesus  of  real  life,  but  the  Christ  as  he  appeared 
to  the  hearts  of  his  followers,  though  of  course  without 
dreaming  of  the  possibility  of  such  an  antithesis. 

2.  Nevertheless  the  Synoptic  Gospels  are  of  priceless  value, 
not  only  as  books  of  religious  edification,  but  also  as  authorities 
for  the  history  of  Jesus.  Though  much  of  their  data  may  be 
uncertain,  the  impression  they  leave  in  the  reader's  mind  of  the 
Bearer  of  Good  Tidings  is  on  the  whole  a  faithful  one.  Brandt 
is  not  wrong,  but  he  does  not  say  enough,  when  he  calls  the 
Synoptic  picture  of  Christ  the  finest  flower  of  religious 
poetry.  The  true  merit  of  the  Synoptists  is  that,  in  spite  of 
all  the  poetic  touches  they  employ,  they  did  not  repaint,  but 
only  handed  on,  the  Christ  of  history.  They  indeed  omitted 
many  of  his  great  words,  either  through  forgetfulness  or 

1  Mark  xv.  33  and  38.  2  Matt,  xxvii.  62  etc.  and  xxviii.  11-Lj. 


372       AX    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT       [CHAP.  i. 

ignorance,  they  misunderstood  many  of  them,  and  altered  the 
form  of  others,  and  it  may  even  have  chanced  that  they  or 
their  authorities  wrongly  attributed  to  Jesus  some  saying 
which,  though  worthy  of  him,  really  came  from  the  lips  of 
some  other  master.  But  the  modern  Jewish  attempts  to  treat 
the  Logia  of  Jesus  given  by  the  Synoptics  as  a  partisan 
selection  of  '  rays  of  light '  from  the  far  richer  wisdom  of  the 
Rabbis — merely  because  there  exist  some  parallels,  sometimes 
of  remarkable  closeness,  between  them  and  the  Mishna  or  the 
Talmud — are  just  as  irrational  as  the  views  of  that  school 
of  criticism  run  wild,  which  regards  these  sayings  as  the  mere 
deposit  of  the 'moods  and  ideals  which  held  sway  among  the  first 
three  generations  of  Christians.  The  mass  of  homogeneous 
parables  alone,  which  we  find  in  the  Synoptics,  compels  us  to 
fall  back  upon  a  single  personality  as  the  author  of  a  mode  of 
teaching  not  elsewhere  adopted  at  the  time,  or  at  least  not 
in  the  same  way  ;  for  how  could  the  age  of  the  Synoptics, 
which  degraded  and  deformed  the  parables  into  allegories,  have 
first  produced  them,  to  its  own  bewilderment  ?  And  the  same 
may  be  said  of  nearly  all  those  isolated  sayings  of  Jesus  which 
the  Evangelists  misunderstood,  or  the  interpretation  of  which 
causes  them  so  much  trouble — as  in  Matt,  xxiii.  p6,  where  the 
author  makes  the  awkward  addition  of  rov  Trorrjpiov  to  TO  svros, 
thereby  destroying  the  meaning  of  the  word  ;  while  the  sayings 
actually  invented  by  the  Synoptists — such  as  the  frequent 
references  of  Jesus  to  his  approaching  sufferings — immediately 
betray  their  external  origin  by  their  monotony  and  their 
absence  of  life.  But,  as  a  rule,  there  lies  in  all  the  Synoptic 
Logia  a  kernel  of  individual  character  so  inimitable  and  so 
fresh  that  their  authenticity  is  raised  above  all  suspicion. 
Jesus  must  have  spoken  just  as  the  Synoptists  make  him  speak, 
when  he  roused  the  people  from  their  torpor,  when  he  comforted 
them  and  lovingly  stooped  to  their  needs,  when  he  revealed 
to  his  disciples  his  inmost  thoughts  about  his  message  of  the 
Kingdom,  when  he  guided  them  and  gave  them  laws,  when  he 
contended  fiercely  with  the  hostile  Pharisees  and  Sadducees,  or 
worsted  them  by  force  of  reasoning : — for  no  otherwise  can  we 
explain  the  world-convulsing  influence  gained  by  so  short  a  life's 
work.  The  impression  that  they  are  veritably  the  words  of 


§  i>9.]    TIIH  HISTORICAL  VALUE  OF  THE  SYNOPTIC  GOSPELS    378 

Jesus  is  by  no  means  altered  by  the  fact  that  they  contain 
side  by  side  things  Jewish  and  things  anti-Jewish,  things 
revolutionary  and  things  conservative,  things  new  and 
things  old,  freedom  and  conventionality  in  judgment,  crudely 
sensuous  hopes  and  a  spiritual  idealism  which  fuses  present 
and  future  into  one  ;  for  he  who  was  destined  to  become  '  all 
things  to  all  men'  in  a  far  higher  sense  than  Paul  must 
have  been  able  to  comprehend  within  himself  the  elements  of 
truth  in  all  antitheses. 

Nor  should  the  Synoptic  accounts  of  the  deeds  and  sufferings 
of  Jesus  be  judged  in  a  less  favourable  light.  It  matters 
little  how  many  of  the  miracle-stories  fall  to  the  ground, 
whether  he  healed  one  blind  man  or  three,  and  how  often  and 
under  what  circumstances  he  waged  his  victorious  war  against 
sin  and  its  attendant  miseries,  illness,  want  and  death  :  the 
main  point  which  each  of  these  more  or  less  embroidered 
stories  seeks  to  illustrate,  and  which  only  a  very  sorry 
rationalism  can  deny,  is  that  he  not  only  taught  but  acted  '  as 
one  that  hath  authority.'  The  fact  that  he  wrought  miracles 
principally  upon  the  mentally  diseased,  as  in  Mark  i.  32-34, 
and  the  observation  made  by  Mark  !  that  because  of  the  unbelief 
of  his  countrymen  at  Nazareth  '  he  could  there  do  no  mighty 
work,  save  that  he  laid  his  hands  upon  a  few  sick  folk,  and 
healed  them,'  enable  us  in  some  degree  to  guess  the  secret  of 
his  success.  Stories  like  that  of  the  '  Talitha  cumi '  of  Mark 
were  not  elaborately  invented,  nor  was  the  Messiah  who  in 
his  night-watch  in  the  Garden  of  Gethsemane,  though  his 
*  soul  was  sorrowful  even  unto  death,'  yet  won  through  prayer 
the  strength  to  go  forward  to  the  end,  in  spite  of  the  blindness 
of  his  disciples,  the  wickedness  of  his  foes  and  the  agony  of  a 
horrible  death — such  a  Messiah  was  not  the  creation  of  the 
idealising  fancy  of  any  class  of  believers,  which  would  have 
employed  far  different  colours. 

Again,  the  figure  of  the  traitor  among  the  Twelve,  or  the 
story  of  Peter  denying  his  Master  before  the  cock  crew,  are 
not  the  mere  products  of  Christian  imagination,  however  much 
may  have  been  imported  into  their  details  by  legend  or  theo- 
logy. Must  Pilate  and  his  favourable  opinion  of  Jesus  have 

1  vi.  5. 


374      AN    1 NTttOD UCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT       TCHAP.  r 


been  invented,  merely  because  the  washing  of  his  hands  an 
his  wife's  dream  seem  improbable  touches  ?  Our  confidence 
is  especially  won  by  the  sober  reserve  with  which  Mark 
ventured  to  know  nothing  of  Jesus  before  his  appearance  in 
public,  and  almost  nothing  of  him  after  his  death.  But  even 
the  extraneous  element  which  finds  its  way  into  the  beginning 
and  end  of  Matthew,  and  still  more  plentifully  into  that  of 
Luke,  is  not  really  inconsistent  with  the  tone  of  the  rest ; 
everything  is  dominated,  within  the  Synoptic  limits,  by  the 
same  spirit,  and  the  insertions  assimilate  themselves  as  though 
of  their  own  accord  to  the  over-mastering  original.  And  if 
the  total  picture  of  Jesus  which  we  obtain  from  the  Synoptics 
displays  all  the  magic  of  reality,  (in  Luke  just  as  much  as  in 
Matthew  and  Mark)  this  is  not  the  effect  of  any  literary  skill— 
often  indeed  defective — on  the  part  of  the  Evangelists,  nor  is 
it  the  result  of  the  poetic  and  creative  power  of  the  authorities 
lying  behind  them ;  but  it  is  rather  owing  to  the  fact  that 
they,  while  modestly  keeping  their  own  personalities  in  the 
background,  painted  Jesus  as  they  found  him  already  existing 
in  the  Christian  communities,  and  that  this  their  model 
corresponded  in  all  essentials  to  the  original.  The  simplest 
faith,  like  the  highest  art — we  learn  this  from  the  Synoptists, 
who  drew  from  the  sources  of  such  a  faith — has  a  wonderfully 
fine  perception  for  the  peculiar  traits  of  its  hero ;  in  recon- 
structing the  precious  image  from  memory,  it  flings  reflection 
and  the  critical  facult}7  aside,  it  omits  much  and  adds  new 
touches,  but  it  attains  at  last,  in  spite  of  all  apparent  weak- 
ness and  caprice,  to  a  picture  such  as  no  master  of  historical 
writing,  though  furnished  with  all  the  aids  of  science  and 
initiated  into  all  the  technicalities  of  his  craft,  can  produ 
in  the  case  of  his  favourite  figures. 

3.  It  sounds  paradoxical  to  say  so,  but  the  history 
the  Synoptic  tradition  stretches  back  to  the  very  lifetime  of 
Jesus.  Within  a  short  time  after  the  appearance  of  the 
Messiah,  certain  particularly  striking  words  of  his  were 
spread  abroad  in  ever  widening  circles,  while  the  fame  of  his 
miracles  penetrated  through  the  length  and  breadth  of  the 
Jewish  lands  ;  no  wonder,  then,  that  mistakes  and  exaggera- 
tions should  soon  have  found  their  way  in.  It  is  absurd 


a 


nd 

: 


$  i>9.]    THE  HISTORICAL  VALUE  OF  THE  SYNOIT1C  GOSPELS 

characterise  the  Gospels  as  late  productions  simply  because 
they  contain  much  legendary  matter ;  the  adherence  of  this 
deposit  to  the  tradition — a  process  which  may  he  observed 
with  all  great  historical  figures — cannot  he  placed  too  early  in 
the  case  of  Jesus.  The  unbelieving  Saul  himself  may  have 
heard  in  Jerusalem  of  his  healings  of  the  blind,  of  his  raisings 
of  the  dead,  and  of  his  power  over  wind  and  waves,  and  even 
his  mortal  enemies,  the  Pharisees,  believed  a  certain  amount 
of  these  things.  Everything  in  this  man,  who  worked  upon 
the  conscience,  feelings  and  imagination  of  the  people  so 
miraculously  seemed  surrounded  with  a  halo  of  miracle ;  the 
thirst  for  the  marvellous  which  the  Master  himself  struggled 
against !  found  nevertheless  its  satisfaction  among  his  followers, 
and  it  was  certainly  owing  solely  to  his  own  temperate  and 
quiet  truthfulness,  naturally  averse  as  it  was  to  any  such 
glorification — let  him  only  be  compared  with  Mahomet  in  this 
respect ! — that  the  tendency  towards  legendary  amplification 
contented  itself  in  his  case  with  adding  some  brightly  coloured 
ornament  to  the  original  picture.  It  is  true  that  it  never 
occurred  to  him  or  to  any  of  his  friends  while  he  was  yet 
working  on  earth  to  organise  a  sort  of  official  report  of  his 
deeds.  And  even  after  his  death  his  followers  would  rather 
wait  with  longing  hearts  for  his  return  than  hasten  to  draw 
up  a  catechism  of  his  life  for  the  instruction  of  later  genera- 
tions ; — no  trace  of  a  primitive  Gospel  of  pre-Pauline  date  is  to 
be  discovered  anywhere.  But  the  remembrance  of  Jesus  did 
not  therefore  die  out.  As  soon  as  the  circle  of  his  intimate 
companions  had  recovered  from  their  dismay  at  his  death  on 
the  Cross,  each  would  seek  to  encourage  the  other  with  the 
help  of  what  they  still  possessed  of  him  ;  his  ivords  became 
the  substitute  for  the  departed  one  himself :  the  favour- 
ite consolation  and  at  the  same  time  the  absolute  standard 
of  the  life  of  the  new  community.  Paul  himself  treated  the 
sayings  of  the  Lord  as  binding  upon  every  Christian  as  a 
matter  of  course,  and  the  few  that  he  quotes  in  his  Epistles 
he  received  from  the  primitive  communities,  which  were  justly 
proud  of  such  possessions.  Words  of  Jesus  were,  of  course, 
still  more  necessary  to  the  Christians  of  Palestine  in  their 

1  Matt.  xii.  38  etc. 


376      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

continual  discussions  with  their  fellow-countrymen,  of  whose 
conversion  they  would  not  despair,  than  they  were  to  the 
Apostle  of  the  Gentiles,  whose  object  was  to  arouse  faith  in  a 
forgiveness  of  sins  and  in  an  eternal  life  and  blessedness 
through  Christ ;  and  it  was  these  words,  whose  super- Jewish 
sublimity  and  anti-Pharisaic  boldness  no  one  could  deny, 
which  did  still  more  than  the  scandalon  of  the  death  on  the 
Cross  to  repel  the  majority  of  Israelites  from  such  a  Messiah. 
Neither  in  Palestine  nor  among  the  Gentiles  in  foreign 
lands,  however,  could  the  preachers  of  Christ  confine  them- 
selves to  handing  on  the  characteristic  utterances  of  their  Lord : 
every  catechumen  as  well  as  every  believer  must  have  been 
repeatedly  told  the  story  of  his  death  and  resurrection,  and 
his  miracles  were  also  appealed  to  as  the  proof  of  his  having 
been  anointed  *  with  the  Holy  Ghost  and  with  power.' !  This 
primitive  interest  in  his  history,  both  in  his  deeds  and  his 
fate,  should  not  be  underrated  ;  in  discussion  with  the  unbe- 
lieving Jews  it  was  important  to  be  able  to  prove  by  concrete 
examples  that  his  life  corresponded  closely  with  the  Messianic 
prophecies  (or  expectations),  that  he  had  walked  the  earth 
possessed  of  divine  power,  endowed  with  supernatural  majesty, 
and  in  every  way  as  the  Son  of  God,  and  that  he  had  fulfilled 
the  will  of  God  just  as  much  by  his  suffering  and  death  as  he 
had  sealed  it  by  his  Resurrection.  But  the  mission  to  the 
Gentiles  was  no  less  in  need  of  this  witness  to  the  Saviour, 
afforded  by  deeds  of  omnipotence  and  by  the  fulfilment 
in  him  of  ancient  prophecy  ;  it  was  not  only  the  school  of 
apologists  inspired  by  Justin  (A.D.  150),  but  Paul  himself,  wh< 
brought  the  Kara  ras  ypa^ds  ~  into  the  foreground  in  dealii 
with  possible  Hellenic  converts,  side  by  side  with  reports  oi 
the  life  and  death  of  Jesus.  And,  in  spite  of  his  contempt 
for  the  Jewish  demand  for  '  signs,'  he  must  have  regarded  th( 
signs  and  wonders  which  were  the  necessary  credentials 
an  Apostle  '  as  absolutely  natural  in  the  case  of  the  Messial 
and  must  have  extolled  them  in  fitting  language  before  hi* 
hearers.  From  this  point  of  view,  as  the  foundation  of 
trust  in  Jesus,  his  gospel,  and  his  revelation,  the  acts 

'  Actsx.  38.  -  1.  Cor.  xv.  3. 

8  1.  Cor.  i.  22.  4  Rom.  xv.  19  ;  2.  Cor.  xii.  12. 


§  29.]    THE  HISTORICAL  VALUE  OF  THE  SYNOPTIC  GOSI'Kl.s 

(-n-pdgsLs)  of  Jesus  might  well  seem  the  most  important  matter 
of  all. 

Nevertheless,  the  relation  between  the  two  sides  of  Gospel 
tradition,  the  sayings  and  the  narratives,  has  been  very  aptly 
compared  with  that  which  exists  in  the  eyes  of  Jewish 
orthodoxy  between  the  Halacha  (doctrine,  interpretation  of  the 
Law)  and  the  Haggada  (continuation  of  the  sacred  history). 
The  stories  seemed  merely  to  lead  the  reader  to  Jesus,  while 
it  was  in  the  saying*  that  men  possessed  his  actual  self.  This 
division  is  frequently  to  be  met  with  ;  Irenaeus,1  for  instance, 
boasts  of  having  heard  Polycarp  relate  both  the  teaching  and 
the  miracles  of  Jesus  (real  irspl  rwv  Svva/jLscov  avrov  KOI  Trspl 
rfjs  SiSao-KaXia?),  and  wherever  we  find  any  comment  on 
the  relationship  between  them,  the  miracles  are  looked  upon 
as  the  preparation  for  the  teaching.  And,  above  all,  we  must 
remember  that  the  Logia  of  Jesus  were  already  in  existence 
in  the  form  which  he  himself  had  given  them,  so  that  any 
alteration  of  their  wording  could  only  be  a  change  for  the 
worse,  while  in  the  case  of  the  stories  about  the  Lord  his 
followers  had  first  to  learn  how  to  tell  them,  so  that  there  the 
form  was  merely  human  handiwork.  Indeed,  a  later  comer 
with  an  entirely  different  version  might  perhaps  materially 
improve  the  narrative  of  a  fellow -believer  who  had  already 
told  the  story  of  some  miracle  many  times.  Thus  the  stereo- 
typing of  the  Gospel  material — as  far  as  it  occurred  at  all — 
took  place  much  earlier  and  more  successfully  in  the  case  of 
the  sayings  of  Jesus  than  in  that  of  the  stories  of  his  life ; 
though  since  the  Christian  communities,  even  in  Palestine, 
were  from  the  outset  much  scattered,  it  could  never  become 
complete  even  in  the  case  of  the  sayings.  Expressions  would 
be  forgotten  here  which  were  remembered  elsewhere  ;  recol- 
lections would  be  revived  in  one  place  and  left  in  obscurity  in 
another ;  thoughts  would  be  strung  together  here  and  left  in 
their  separate  form  there,  and  so  on,  and  we  should  be  obliged 
to  assume  a  sort  of  central  inspection  of  the  Gospel  tradition, 
exercising  its  functions  with  great  rigour  and  still  greater  good 
fortune,  in  order  to  make  it  seem  probable  that  there  was  any 

1  Euseb.  Hist.  Eccles.  V.  xx.  6. 


378      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

considerable  uniformity  in  that  tradition  before  the  period  of 
the  written  propagation  of  the  Gospel. 

Papias  tells  us  that  the  Apostle  Matthew  inaugurated 
this  period  by  writing  down  (of  course  in  the  popular  dialect 
of  Palestine)  a  collection  of  Sayings  of  the  Lord.  None 
but  certain  modern  theologians  who  are  anxious  to  reproduce 
the  Original  Gospel  by  re-translation  from  the  Greek,  but  who 
do  not  know  Aramaic,  declare  that  Matthew  wrote  in  the 
sacred  language,  the  Hebrew  of  the  Old  Testament.  We  do 
not  doubt  the  statement  of  Papias,1  and  it  is  to  the  eternal 
credit  of  the  primitive  community  that  it  preserved  to  the 
Church  the  Jesus  of  history,  as  well  as  the  Christ  of  the 
believer's  reflection.  We  know  nothing  definite  as  to  the 
motives  which  induced  this  Apostle  to  take  up  his  pen,  but  it 
can  only  have  been  when  the  number  of  ear-witnesses  of  the 
words  of  Jesus  had  considerably  diminished,  and  the  need  arose 
of  handing  on  the  substance  of  his  Gospel,  under  the  authority  of 
an  eye-witness  and  in  permanent  form  (i.e.  in  writing),  to  a  ris- 
ing generation  who  had  neither  heard  nor  seen  the  Lord.  The 
author  probably  aspired  as  little  to  any  exhaustive  complete- 
ness as  he  did  to  accuracy  of  chronological  sequence  ;  nor  could 
he  have  attained  to  either,  since  his  memory  and  his  oppor- 
tunities for  investigation  had  their  limits,  and  the  community, 
moreover,  had  never  been  at  all  anxious  to  know  wlien  Jesus 
had  uttered  a  particular  saying  (any  more  than  when  he  had 
wrought  a  particular  miracle),  but  only  what  he  had  revealed 
and  what  he  had  promised.  The  Logia  document  of  Matthew 
probably  consisted  in  a  selection  of  the  most  important  words 
of  Jesus  known  to  the  writer,  made  with  all  possible  fidelity 
and  with  a  timid  endeavour  to  reproduce  some  larger  groups 
by  arranging  them  according  to  their  subjects.  Greek 
literature  possessed  similar  collections  of  the  utterances  of 
wise  men  (aTro^Os^^ara)  in  considerable  numbers.  And  that 
such  logia-books  were  renewed  even  in  later  times  is  proved  by 
the  discovery  at  Oxyrhynchos,  published  in  1897  by  Messrs 
Grenfell  and  Hunt  under  the  title  of  Aoyia  '1 770-00  ('  Sayings  of 
our  Lord,  from  an  early  Greek  Papyrus  '),  in  which  apparently 
we  have  a  Christian  of  about  300  A.D.  making  a  collection  of 

1  See  pp.  300,  307. 


§  i>9.]    THE  HISTORICAL  VALTM  OF  Till'.  SYNOPTIC  GOSPELS    :\  t  '-> 

sayings  pure  and  simple,  all  of  them  introduced  by  the  words 


\EJSI,  '[rja-ovs.  How  opportune  was  the  undertaking  of  Matthew 
was  proved  by  its  success  ;  even  in  the  Greek  communities  it 
was  soon  felt  to  be  indispensable,  and  preachers  interpreted  it 
as  well  as  they  could  until  good  written  translations  did 
away  with  the  necessity  for  such  separate  efforts,  and  at 
last  actually  supplanted  the  Aramaic  original  altogether. 
The  collection  as  such  was  not  regarded  as  Scripture,  and 
only  the  word  of  Jesus  which  it  contained  was  sacred  ;  how 
can  we  wonder,  then,  that  the  copyists  were  no  more  servile 
in  their  treatment  of  its  text  than  the  unknown  transla- 
tors ?  Wherever  it  was  possible  to  make  an  edifying  inser- 
tion, to  explain,  to  correct  by  the  light  of  a  different  tradi- 
tion, or  perhaps  even  to  rewrite  in  another  form,  it  was 
done  ;  one  translation  would  be  corrected  by  another,  and 
thus  perhaps  not  two  copies  of  the  Logia  document  would 
finally  have  been  exactly  similar  in  every  part.  This  would 
have  been  another  reason  for  its  disappearance.  But  it 
probably  did  not  entirety  disappear  till  the  complete  Gos- 
pels rendered  further  competition  impossible,  and  made 
the  document  itself  superfluous  by  appropriating  all  its  con- 
tents. 

It  is  impossible  to  say  whether  in  this  transition  between 
the  Apostolic  and  Post-Apostolic  ages,  other  similar  collections 
arose  —  either  suggested  by  the  example  of  Matthew  or  else 
independently  of  him  —  or  not.  But  even  if  they  did,  they 
would  not  have  included  all  the  sayings  of  Jesus  which  were 
in  circulation  at  that  time,  and  thus  it  would  be  possible  even 
after  100  years  and  more  had  passed  away  to  draw  from  the 
fuller,  though  certainly  less  limpid,  oral  tradition  certain 
sayings  —  beside  much  that  was  of  little  value  —  which,  though 
not  Biblical  ('  Agrapha  '),  yet  have  the  true  ring  about  them, 
like  the  *  Be  ye  true  money-changers  '  (ylvsaQs  ^oKipot, 
TpaTrs&rai)  so  often  quoted  by  the  Fathers,  or  the  logion  from 
the  Gospel  according  to  the  Hebrews,  '  And  ye  should  never 
be  glad  except  when  ye  look  upon  your  brother  in  love.' 

The  first  step  in  the  conversion  of  the  Gospel  material 
into  literature  was  necessarily  followed  by  others.  A  legiti- 
mate need  of  the  community  for  an  account  of  their  Saviour 


380      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP,  i 

in  full,  especially  in  his  suffering  and  death,  but,  above  all,  the 
need  felt  by  the  Christian  teachers  of  possessing  a  document 
to  which  they  could  appeal  in  their  battles  for  the  true  Messiah 
against  unbelievers,  which  would  provide  them  with  the 
means  of  demonstrating  that  Jesus  was  the  Beloved  Son  of 
God,  in  spite  of  all  apparent  failure  and  defeat — such  needs 
were  met  soon  after  70  by  Mark*  Either,  however,  because 
he  knew  that  his  readers  were  already  fairly  familiar  with  the 
Sayings  of  the  Lord,  or  else  because  they  were  less  necessary 
for  his  purpose,  he  laid  special  stress  upon  the  narrative  side. 
He  may  have  been  assisted  in  this  task  by  his  recollections 
from  his  intercourse  with  Peter,  but  as  a  matter  of  fact  he  did 
not  care  very  much  w hence  he  drew  any  particular  episode,  so 
long  as  it  suited  his  book.  Mark  is,  moreover,  obviously 
influenced  by  theological  considerations ;  certain  features  in 
his  account  of  the  Passion  clearly  betray  their  origin  in  the 
author's  desire  to  see  the  prophecies  of  the  Old  Testament 
fulfilled.  Thus  the  spitting  upon  Jesus,1  the  buffeting  and 
scourging,2  come  from  Isaiah  1.  6,  the  silence  of  Jesus 3  from 
Isaiah  liii.  7,  his  crucifixion  between  two  robbers  from 
Isaiah  liii.  12,  the  casting  of  lots  for  his  raiment  from 
Psalm  xxi.  19  (and  xxii.  18).  But  the  fact  that  he  does  not 
quote  the  Old  Testament  parallels  seems  to  favour  the  view 
that  Mark  did  not  think  out  these  things  for  himself,  but 
followed  the  tradition  here  as  elsewhere.  And  in  the  case  of 
the  trial  and  execution  of  Jesus — events  for  which  the  Christian 
community  itself  was  not  able  to  procure  any  trustworth 
witness — the  process  of  reconstruction  naturally  began  on  th 
very  first  day.  The  task  of  depicting  in  accordance  with  God' 
Word  the  manner  in  which  the  Messiah  must  have  suffered 
and  died  was  one  to  which  the  Apostles  themselves  migh 
gladly  have  given  their  assistance. 

Similar  productions  must  have  arisen  in  considerabl 
numbers  between  the  years  70  and  100,  for  Luke  speaks  of 
many  predecessors  ;  '  many '  may  not  indeed  mean  25  or  100, 
but  certainly  more  than  two,  and  this  is  sufficient  evidence  that 
the  demand  again  and  again  exceeded  the  supply,  and  that  the 
idea  of  the  stability  and  uniformity  of  the  tradition  is  imagi- 

1  xiv.  65.  2  xv.  15,  19.  '  xiv.  Gl. 


u 

; 


§  :*).]    THE  HISTORICAL  VALUE  OF  THE  SYNOPTIC  GOSPELS    381 

nary.  The  mutual  relationship  of  these  productions  was 
probably  very  much  confused  ;  but  we  may  assume  that  all 
of  them  made  use  of  oral  traditions  in  various  degrees  as 
well  as  of  written  authorities.  Those  of  them  which  were 
not  saved,  like  Mark  and  Matthew,  by  admission  into  the 
Canon,  disappeared  ;  the  apocryphal  Gospels  of  the  second 
century,  such  as  those  according  to  the  Hebrews,  to  the  Egyp- 
tians, to  Peter,  of  which  some  parts  have  been  preserved, 
and  probably  also  a  Gospel  fragment  from  a  papyrus  found 
at  Fayoum  (a  parallel  to  Matt.  xxvi.  29-34),  to  which  Professor 
G.  Bickell  of  Vienna  enthusiastically  assigns  a  very  high  place 
— all  these  are  in  reality  modified  versions  of  the  Canonical 
Gospels,  written  to  suit  sectarian  or  heretical  tendencies  ;  but 
that  is  no  reason  why  occasional  fragments  of  primitive 
tradition  should  not  have  found  their  way  into  them.  Luke 
and  Matthew,  however,  seem  already  to  stand  at  the  point 
where  the  production  of  Gospels  ceased  to  be  a  gain  to  the 
Church  and  began  to  mean  danger  only,  and  even  John  must 
share  in  this  judgment  to  some  extent ;  from  Luke  onwards 
the  writing  of  Gospels  fell  into  the  hands  of  romancers  and 
religious  philosophers,  or  rather  perhaps  of  theologians  and 
theologasters,  and  the  Church  did  well  to  pay  but  scant  atten- 
tion to  their  productions.  Moreover  Luke  set  up  a  fatal  ideal 
with  his  '  all  things  accurately  from  the  first,'  for  the  later 
writers  omitted  his  inward  qualification,  *  as  far  as  I  could  find 
out  anything  about  them,'  and  peopled  with  the  creations  of 
their  own  fancy  just  those  periods  of  the  life  of  Jesus  which 
had  till  then  remained  almost  empty — i.e.  his  youth  and  the 
days  immediately  following  his  resurrection.  These  Gospels 
of  the  Childhood  and  the  Ascension  have  no  longer  any  con- 
nection with  the  tradition,  except  where  they  borrow  from  the 
Canonical  Gospels,  and  it  would  be  absurd  to  take  them 
seriously  into  account  as  authorities  for  the  history  of  Jesus, 
especially  in  the  case  of  those  Gospels  which  were  only  com- 
posed in  order  to  furnish '  Evangelistic  '  proofs  for  the  peculiar 
dogmas  of  some  Gnostic  school.  In  both  these  genres  the 
Gospel  story  merely  serves  as  the  means  to  some  ulterior  end. 
Matthew  produces  the  impression  of  being  slightly  further  re- 
moved from  this  sort  of  writing  than  Luke,  because,  in  spite  of 


382      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  j. 

his  additions  to  Mark  at  the  beginning  and  end,  he  is  still 
fairly  reticent  about  the  history  of  the  Risen  Christ,  and  con- 
tents himself  in  his  Birth-story  also  with  two  or  three 
edifying  pictures.  Luke,  on  the  other  hand,  has  a  very  highly 
coloured  early  history,  which  extends  as  far  as  Jesus'  twelfth 
year  ;  his  Resurrection  chapter  is  nearly  three  times  as  long- 
as  Matthew's,  and  instead  of  the  one  cry  which  according  to 
Mark  and  Matthew  Jesus  uttered  on  the  Cross — *  Eloi,  Eloi, 
lama  sabachthani  ? ' — he  puts  three  other  sayings  into  the 
mouth  of  Christ  which  express,  not  torture  and  anguish  of  soul, 
but  their  contrary.1  These  three  words  were  unquestionably 
unknown  to  Mark  and  Matthew,  nor  can  they,  in  spite  of  their 
beauty,  have  been  founded  on  tradition  ;  they  are  rather  the 
expression  of  what  the  faith  of  later  Christians  saw  in  the  heart 
of  their  dying  Redeemer.  But  Luke  readily  poetised,  and  incor- 
porated poetry,  while  Matthew  did  so  only  in  case  of  need  ; 
this  difference,  however,  between  the  personalities  of  the  two 
writers  need  not  imply  a  difference  of  date  between  their  re- 
spective productions.  Each  of  the  three  Synoptics  contains 
some  elements  invented  independently  of  the  tradition,  bu 
even  these  have  their  value,  since  they  were  not  the  products 
of  mythologising  art,  but  the  half  nai've  conversions  into  fact 
of  things  of  which  Jesus  was  believed  capable,  closely  con- 
nected, too,  both  in  style  and  tone,  with  the  best- attested 
passages  in  the  Gospels.  That  Luke  contains  a  far  greater 
abundance  of  those  elements  than  either  Matthew  or  Mark 
is,  however,  compensated  for  by  the  fact  that  he  alone  has 
preserved  to  us  a  succession  of  the  noblest  gems  of  the  Gospel 
tradition,  which,  but  for  his  fortunate  hand,  would  have  been 
lost  to  mankind. 

As  long  as  the  Gospel  material  was  still  in  a  plastic  state, 
before  the  canonisation  of  certain  definite  forms  of  it,  three 
different  periods  may  be  distinguished  :  first,  that  of  oral 
transmission  (between  the  years  30  and  60),  when  the  holders 
of  the  tradition,  unconcerned  for  the  wishes  of  future  genera- 
tions, but  compelled  by  the  religious  duties  of  the  moment, 
kept  the  main  outlines  of  the  Gospel  story  fresh  and  living  in 
the  minds  of  the  community  ;  secondly,  that  of  the  Synoptic 

1  xxiii.  31,  43  an.l  1G. 


§  29.]    THE  HISTORICAL  VALUE  OF  THE  SYNOPTIC  GOSPELS    383 

record  (from  about  60  to  about  100),  when,  after  an  Apostle  had 
laid  the  foundation  of  a  Gospel  literature,  '  many '  writers, 
among  them  Mark,  Matthew  and  Luke,  created  in  similar 
fashion  (since  all  were  in  closest  touch  with  the  tradition)  and 
by  selection  from  the  materials  still  available,  a  written  pre- 
sentation of  the  Gospel  story,  clear,  connected,  and  neglecting 
none  of  the  points  of  primary  importance ;  and  thirdly,  that 
of  the  fabrication  (from  the  beginning  of  the  second  century 
onwards)  of  apocryphal  Gospels,  when  the  living  tradition  was 
exhausted,  the  religious  necessities  of  the  majority  satisfied 
by  the  great  existing  Gospels,  and  the  passion  for  further 
production,  if  it  did  not  manifest  itself  solely  in  the  emenda- 
tion of  older  Gospels  to  suit  various  dogmatic  prejudices,  found 
an  outlet  in  the  actual  manufacture  of  new  material.  The 
first  period  was  the  richest  in  its  aggregate  possessions,  but 
the  individual,  even  a  Paul,  for  instance,  possessed  but  frag- 
ments ;  the  second  effected  by  crystallisation  into  writing  a 
consolidation  which,  in  spite  of  the  decrease  of  material,  was 
yet  a  step  in  advance ;  and  after  100  begins  the  decadence. 
Later  generations  sought  to  conceal  their  imitation  of  the 
ancients  and  to  produce  the  appearance  of  wealth  by  remodel- 
ling well-attested  matter  in  accordance  with  later  tastes,  or 
else  by  bringing  together  a  mass  of  fables  that  were  wholly 
unattested.  The  Gospel  descended  to  the  market-place,  while 
the  prominent  appearance  in  it  of  other  personalities  robbed 
it  of  all  its  peculiar  charm.  The  Church  showed  great  tact 
in  refusing  to  countenance  these  so-called  Gospels,  and  we  have 
good  grounds  for  supposing  that  in  the  Synoptics  she  has 
handed  down  to  us  the  best  that  ever  existed  under  that  title, 
and  that  the  Gospel  story  was  never  and  nowhere  so  truly, 
fully  and  plainly  told  as  in  Mark,  Matthew  and  Luke. 

B.     JOHN 
§  30.  The  Gospel  according  to  John 

[Cf.  works  mentioned  at  §  23.  For  commentaries  see  Meyer, 
ii.,  by  B.  Weiss  (ed.  8,  1893) ;  '  Hand-Commentar,'  iv.,  by  Holtz- 
mann  (ed.  2,  1893) ;  C.  E.  Luthardt,  '  Das  Johanneische  Evange- 
lium '  (1875-76)  ;  F.  Godet,  '  Saint  Jean.'  The  last  two  take 
the  apologetic  side  entirely,  but  Luthardt  with  slightly  more 


384       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

perception  of  the  difficulties  than  Godet.  Further,  O.  Holtzmann, 
'  Das  Joh.  Evangelium  untersucht  und  erklart '  (1887)  ;  F.  Spitta's 
article  on  '  Unordnungen  im  Texte  des  vierten  Evangeliums,'  in 
'  Zur  Gesch.  und  Liter,  des  Urchristentums,'  part  i.  1893,  pp.  155 
-204  ;  W.  Baldensperger,  '  Der  Prolog  des  vierten  Evangeliums  ' 
(1898) ,  which  reconstructs  a  new  historical  background  for  the  Fourth 
Gospel  with  equal  boldness  and  skill  (on  this  question  compare 
W.  Wrede  in  '  Gottingische  gelehrte  Anzeigen  '  for  1900,  pp.  1-26) 
and  H.  H.  Wendt,  '  Das  Johannesevangelium — Eine  Untersuch- 
ung  seiner  Entstehung  und  seines  geschichtlichen  Wertes ' 
(1900),  a  defence  of  the  hypothesis  that  certain  earlier  written 
records  from  the  Apostle's  hand  were  embodied  and  recast  in  the 
discourses  of  the  Fourth  Gospel.  Lastly,  C.  Weizsacker's  chapter 
on  the  Fourth  Gospel  in  his  '  Apostolisches  Zeitalter '  (1892),  which 
will  always  remain  a  classic  (pp.  513-538,  and  cf.  476-486).] 


.. 


1.  The  Gospel  of  John  has  been  credited  by  lovers  of  tl 
mysterious  with  a  construction  devised  with  the  most 
exquisite  art ;  that  is,  with  a  system  of  trinities  (Dreiheiteri) 
carried  out  with  equal  persistency  in  small  things  l  as  in 
great.  The  writer  himself,  according  to  this  theory,  did  not 
perceive  the  greater  part  of  them,  and  the  most  contradictory 
views  have  been  put  forward  with  equal  justice  as  to  his  own 
intentions  in  the  matter  of  arrangement.  In  reality  one 
section  usually  fits  into  the  next  by  its  very  form,  and 
larger  divisions  can  be  suggested  at  many  different  points 
almost  as  well  as  in  the  single  case  of  chapter  xiii.,  after 
which  the  Gospel  unfolds  the  passage  of  Jesus  to  the  Father 
in  a  variety  of  scenes,  whereas  up  to  that  point  it  had 
described  his  activity  on  earth  alone. 

The  Prologue  (i.  1-18)  expounds  in  short,  terse  sentences 
what  really  forms  the  subject  of  the  Gospel.  Jesus  is  the  in- 
carnate 'Word,'  the  universal  Reason  which  has  been  with  God 
from  all  eternity,  and  he  has  now  come  down  among  us  men 
to  bring  us  grace  and  truth  and  the  perfect  knowledge  of  God. 
Upon  this  John  the  Baptist,  who  had  already  been  mentioned 
in  the  Prologue  '2  as  a  witness  to  the  only-begotten  Son,  leads 
up  through  a  series  of  other  witnesses  to  the  first  public 
appearance  of  the  Son  of  (lod,  for  whom  he  was  to  prepare 


E.g.,  i.  1  •  b  •« 


1  i.  15-18. 


§30.]  TIM-:    COSI'KI,    A<r<>K!>l.\<;    TO    JOHN  385 

the  way ;  a  group  of  disciples  gather  round  Jesus,  and 
Nathaniel  repeats  the  testimony  of  John.1  Next,  Jesus  mani- 
fests his  glory  by  performing  his  first  miracle,  the  conversion 
of  the  water  into  wine  at  the  marriage  at  Gana.2  From  Cana 
he  journeys  through  Capernaum  to  Jerusalem  and  there 
cleanses  the  Temple 3 ;  he  finds  faith  even  among  the  rulers  of 
the  Jews,  one  of  whom,  Nicodemus,  comes  to  him  by  night  and 
holds  converse  with  him  about  the  second  birth.4  Jesus' 
activity  as  baptiser  next  calls  forth  fresh  testimonies  from 
John,5  and  on  his  journey  through  Samaria  he  reveals 
himself  to  a  Samaritan  woman  as  Prophet  and  Messiah, 
while  other  Samaritans  believe  on  him  'because  of  his  word.' G 
On  his  return  to  Galilee  he  heals  the  nobleman's  son  at 
Capernaum.7  The  subsequent  feast  of  the  Jews  takes  him 
again  to  Jerusalem,  where  at  the  Pool  of  Bethesda  he  heals 
by  a  single  word  the  man  who  had  been  infirm  for  thirty-eight 
years,  thereby  breaking  the  Sabbath  and  being  obliged  to  defend 
himself  against  the  Jews.8  The  feeding  of  the  five  thousand 
on  the  other  side  of  the  Sea  of  Tiberias  next  leads  to  the 
sayings  in  which  he  calls  himself  the  *  bread  of  life '  and 
speaks  of  the  eating  of  his  flesh  and  the  drinking  of  his  blood, 
upon  which  a  division  occurs  in  the  ranks  of  his  disciples.9 
At  the  Feast  of  Tabernacles  in  Jerusalem  matters  come  to  a 
collision  between  him  and  the  Jews,  who  are  already  planning 
his  destruction  ;  the  fools  among  them  will  not  hear  at  any 
price  of  a  Galilsean  Messiah.10  An  episode !1  tells  how  he  set 
free  the  woman  taken  in  adultery,  whose  judges  had  all  dis- 
appeared because  none  dared  cast  the  first  stone  at  her  and 
thus  inflict  the  punishment  to  which  she  was  liable  in  the 
eyes  of  the  Law.  Then  follow  further  disputes  with  the  Jews,12 
in  which  Jesus  seeks  to  demonstrate  the  contrasts,  typified 
by  himself  and  them,  between  light  and  darkness,  above  and 
beneath,  freedom  and  bondage,  the  children  of  God  and  the 
children  of  the  devil — all  this  leading  up  to  the  healing 
on  the  Sabbath  of  the  man  born  blind,13  at  which  the 

1  i.  19-51.  -  ii.  1-11.  3  ii.  12-25.  *  iii.  1_21. 

5  iii.  22-36.  *  iv.  1-42.  7  iv.  43-54. 

8  Ch.  v.  9  Ch.  vi.  '°  Ch.  vii. 

11  vii.  53-viii.  11.  '-  viii.  12-59.  ls  Ch.  ix. 

C  C 


2 


386       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

wilful  blindness  of  the  Jews  is  fully  brought  to  light. 
He  declares  himself  the  good  shepherd  who  collects  his 
scattered  sheep  into  one  flock  and  is  willing  to  lay  down 
his  life  for  them,  but  the  unbelievers,  those  who  are  '  not  of 
his  sheep,'  see  in  him  one  possessed  with  a  devil ;  and  later 
on,  when  at  the  feast  of  the  Dedication  in  Jerusalem  he 
announces  plainly — in  answer  to  a  question  from  the  Jews — 
that  he  is  the  Christ,  and  even  that  '  he  and  the  Father  are 
one,'  his  hearers  threaten  to  stone  him  for  blasphemy.1  The 
last  section  of  this  first  part,  x.  40-xii.  50,  shows  the 
breach  complete  between  the  Christ  and  the  mass  of  the 
Jews  ;  in  the  very  detailed  account  of  the  raising  of  the  four 
days  buried  Lazarus,  Jesus  reveals  himself  as  the  Resurrec- 
tion  and  the  Life,  but  before  this  2  he  suffers  himself  to  be 
anointed  as  though  for  burial  by  the  sisters  of  Lazarus  in 
Bethany.  Then  in  Jerusalem,  which  he  enters  amid  cries 
Hosanna,:]  himself  conscious  of  approaching  death,  he  se 
the  great  decision  for  the  last  time  before  the  people.  A  few 
Greeks  indeed  seek  him  out,  a  voice  from  Heaven  announces 
his  approaching  glorification  in  the  presence  of  the  multitude, 
but  he  finds  but  little  faith  among  the  people,  and  even 
among  his  followers  there  are  many  who  do  not  venture  to 
acknowledge  him. 

From  chapter  xiii.  onwards  he  devotes  himself  solely  to  his 
disciples  ;  the  action  of  washing  their  feet,  which  he  perfori 
after  a  meal,  is  made  the  occasion  for  the  expulsion  of  tl 
traitor  Judas ;  and  throughout  the  next  three  chapters  4 
addresses  those  long-drawn  parting  speeches  to  the  Elev< 
in  which  he  exhorts  them  to  remain  steadfast  in  love, 
prayer  and  in  him,  the  true  Vine,  even  after  his  departure 
promises  to  send  them  the  *  Paraclete,'  the  Holy  Spirit  pi 
ceeding  from  the  Father,  as  a  substitute  for  his  own  present 
and  finally  comforts  them  with  the  thought  of  the  hour 
re-union,  when  there  would  be  no  more  *  speaking  in  proverbs 
Then  follows 5  the  '  High -Priestly  '  prayer  for  the  glorificatic 
of  the  Son  and  all  his  disciples.     The  story  of  his  suffering, 
death  and  burial  fills  the  next  two  chapters  ;  three  appeal 


1  x.  1-39. 

4  xiii.  31-xvi.  33. 


-  xii.  1-11. 
3  Ch.  xvii. 


3  xii.  12-15. 


THK    (iOSPEL   ACCORDING    TO    JOHN  387 

ances  of  the  Kisen  One — to  Mary,  to  the  Eleven  and  to 
Thomas — are  described  in  chapter  xx.,  and  the  Gospel  appears 
to  end  at  verse  30 ;  then,  however,  another  chapter  follows  in 
a  supplementary  manner,  telling  of  the  miraculous  draught  of 
fishes  which  the  risen  Christ  causes  his  disciples  to  make 
in  the  Sea  of  Tiberias.  The  end  is  formed  by  prophecies 
concerning  the  death  of  Peter  and  of  the  Beloved  Disciple. 

2.  The  peculiar  character  borne  by  the  Gospel  of  John, 
differing  as  it  does  so  markedly  from  the  Synoptics  that  even 
a  child  learning  its  Sunday  lesson  would  notice  it,  cannot  be 
explained  by  the  ostensible  purpose  ascribed  to  it  in  xx.  31. 
The  Synoptics,  too,  were  written  in  order  to  bring  their  readers 
faith  in  Jesus  as  Messiah  and  as  the  Son  of  God,  and  thereby 
to  give  them  eternal  life  in  his  Name ;  and  if  John  expressly 
declares l  that  he  did  not  attempt  to  make  his  record  complete, 
the  same  may  certainly  be  said  of  Mark.  It  is  rather  that 
the  special  *  tendency '  of  the  writer  gained  an  infinitely 
greater  influence  over  the  Gospel  material  in  John  than  in 
the  case  of  the  Synoptics.  Let  us  but  compare  the  Prologues 
of  Luke  and  of  John  :  in  the  former  it  is  the  interest  of  the 
historian  that  is  displayed  in  '  those  matters  which  have  been 
fulfilled  among  us,'  he  wishes  to  relate  '  all  things  accurately 
from  the  first,'  while  in  the  latter  the  theologian  sums  up  in 
terse  phrases  the  truths  which  every  reader  must  bring  with 
him  in  order  to  study  the  Gospel  story  in  the  spirit  of  piety. 
This  Prologue,  in  fact,  contains  the  whole  of  the  Gospel  in 
nuce.  It  contains  the  melody,  the  Leit-motiv  (especially 
vv.  11-14)  which  rings  in  our  ears  again  and  again  amid  a 
mass  of  variations.  The  instrument  to  which  the  composer  is 
bound  is  the  earthly  life  of  Jesus,  and  thus  everything  which 
we  learn  in  the  Fourth  Gospel  has  the  sound  of  history,  but 
the  important  thing  is  not  to  hear  the  history,  but  to  catch 
the  melody  through  it,  and  to  satisfy  the  soul  with  the  enjoy- 
ment of  it.  But  it  is  certainly  an  exaggeration  to  think  that 
the  miracle  stories  existed  in  the  mind  of  John  only  as  alle- 
gories, as  disguises  for  his  own  metaphysical  and  religious 
thoughts,  for  we  should  then  be  obliged  to  extend  this 
theory  to  the  story  of  the  Passion  as  well,  which  is  out 

1  xx.  30,  and  cf.  xxi.  25. 

c  c  ?. 


388       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THK    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

of  the  question  ;  Nicodemus,  too,  and  Nathaniel  are  meant 
to  be  taken  as  historical  personages  just  as  seriously  as 
John,1  Simon  Peter,2  Thomas 3  or  the  High  Priest  Caia- 
phas.4 

The  writer  believed  the  marriage  at  Cana  to  have  been 
an  actual  event,  the  changing  of  ordinary  water  into  noble 
wine  to  have  taken  place  on  that  occasion  ;  he  does  not  intend 
the  man  '  blind  from  his  birth  '  of  chapter  ix.  to  be  a  symbol  of 
those  who  were  as  yet  unenlightened,  who  had  never  seen  God, 
nor  his  Lazarus  to  be  a  personification  of  the  creature  subject 
to  decay,  in  the  sense  of  Eomans  vii.  24  and  viii.  20.  But 
he  treats  almost  all  these  persons  as  mere  framework  ;  they 
vanish  as  suddenly  as  they  appear,  as  in  the  case  of  Nico- 
demus and  of  the  Greeks  who  wished  to  see  Jesus."  The 
Evangelist  only  takes  an  interest  in  them  as  long  as  he  can 
make  use  of  them  to  reflect  some  feature  of  the  inner  life  of 
Jesus.  The  miracles,  in  fact,  attest  the  divine  omnipotence  of 
Jesus,  the  sayings  his  divine  omniscience,  and  the  double  mean- 
ings conveyed  in  both  strengthen  in  a  manner  characteristic 
of  the  author's  taste  the  impression  of  the  unique  greatness, 
thefulness,G  of  Jesus.  The  Fourth  Evangelist  certainly  did  not 
undervalue  the  evidential  power  of  miracles  in  awakening  faith, 
as  may  be  seen  by  ii.  11  and  23,  but  he  places  a  still  higher  value 
on  knowledge  than  on  power,  and  this  explains  the  marked  pre- 
ponderance he  gives  to  the  words  of  Jesus,  which  he  regards 
as  indispensable  commentaries  even  on  the  miracles. 

But,  more  than  this,  John  does  not  paint  the  wonder-work- 
ing Jesus  as  one  who  used  his  power  to  exercise  compassion, 
to  banish  trouble  and  misery  and  to  dry  the  weeping  eye  ; 
touches  like  Luke's  'And  when  the  Lord  saw  her  he  had 
compassion  on  her  .  .  .  and  he  gave  him  to  his  mother ' 7— 
even  the  very  words  for  '  compassion  '—are  not  to  be  found 
in  John  ;  here  the  actions  of  the  Saviour,  who  knows  well 
how  to  appreciate  love,s  are  not  directed  towards  removing 
the  petty  ills  of  the  day,  but  solely  towards  the  ultimate  goal 
of  pointing  out  the  division  between  the  children  of  God, 

1  Chaps,  i.  and  iii.  -  Cli;q>s.  xiii.  and  xxi.  8  xx.  24. 

4  xi.  49.  .  'JO  '2-2.  *  i.  14  and  16. 

7  Luke  vii.  13  fol.  "  v.  42,  xiii.  35  and  Ch.  xv. 


§  30.]  THE    GOSPEL   ACCORDING   TO   JOHN  389 

the  children  of  the  world  who  had  given  themselves  over  to 
perdition.  God  loves  the  world  only  in  so  far  as  it  is  his  work 
and  contains  the  germ  of  eternity,  nor  are  we  bidden  to  love  the 
world  or  the  sinner,  but  Light,  God  and  the  brethren.  The 
one-sidedness  of  the  central  idea  of  John,  upon  which  all  the 
words — and  deeds — of  Jesus  turn,  is,  after  all,  its  chief 
characteristic  ;  Jesus  lifts  up  his  voice,  not  in  order  to  explain 
the  riddles  of  life  and  of  history,  to  supply  his  hearers  with 
advice  for  their  practical  conduct  or  with  precepts  for  the  new 
morality  (as  in  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount),  or  to  solve  certain 
problems  of  the  Jewish  faith  and  Jewish  philosophy,  such  as 
those  of  healing  on  the  Sabbath,  true  cleanliness,  or  the 
resurrection  of  the  dead ;  wherever  he  is  not  speaking  as  a 
Prophet  in  order  to  reveal  his  omniscience,  or  in  parables  in 
order  to  test  the  understanding  of  his  hearers,  he  has  one 
constant  theme  —  himself,  his  relations  to  the  Father,  to  the 
world  and  to  those  who  believe  in  him,  and  through  all  this 
the  fulfilment,  the  completion  of  the  Scriptures.  This  gives 
the  Gospel  a  remarkable  monotony ;  sublime  as  its  ideas  are, 
they  are  but  few,  repeated  again  and  again  and  expressed  in 
scarcely  differing  forms  ;  and  this  impression  is  strengthened 
by  a  certain  poverty  of  vocabulary  and  a  sameness  in  the 
manner  of  presentation. 

At  first  sight,  John  appears  to  be  constructed  with  more 
skill  and  to  attain  a  higher  unity  than  Matthew  itself. 
Whereas  the  Synoptics  usually  string  their  material  together 
by  external  links  only,  John  creates  a  sort  of  drama,  in  which 
later  events  constantly  refer  to  earlier,1  and  the  chronological 
thread  is  never  lost  sight  of  ;  from  the  first  appearance  of  Jesus 
to  the  end  we  may  always  know  exactly  where  the  action  takes 
place,  nor  is  there  any  lack  of  definite  indications  of  time  and 
place,  such  as  Cana,  Bethany,  Sychar  in  Samaria,  the  '  two 
days  '  of  iv.  40  and  43,  or  the  '  midst  of  the  feast '  and  the 
'  last  day,  the  great  day  of  the  feast,'  of  chapter  vii.  But  we 
are  inclined  to  feel  that  by  this  constant  change  of  scene  an 
appearance  of  movement  is  artificially  produced  of  which  the 

1  E.g.,  iv.  15  to  ii.  23 ;  iv.  46  (and  54)  to  ii.  1-11 ;  vii.  23  to  v.  8  and  9  ; 
xiii.  33  to  vii.  33  fol.  and  viii.  21  fol. ;  xv.  20  to  xiii.  10,  and  xviii.  14  to  xi 
49  fol. 


390       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

reality  is  entirely  lacking ;  not  only  is  there  no  space  left 
for  any  development  in  Jesus  himself :  there  is  not  even  room 
for  it  in  his  relations  with  the  world  and  in  his  achievements. 
He  himself — quite  in  accordance  with  the  dogma  of  the  Gospel 
— is  the  same  on  the  first  day  as  after  his  Eesurrection ;  we 
are  told  nothing  of  his  birth,  nothing  of  his  baptism,  of  his 
sojourn  in  the  wilderness  or  even  of  his  temptation.  Even 
the  division  of  mankind  into  believers,  enemies,  and  waverers, 
is  there  from  the  beginning.  That  he  was  joyfully  acclaimed 
at  first  from  all  sides,  then  that  the  people  grew  suspicious 
and  in  open  disputes  applied  the  test  of  Jewish  standards  to 
his  piety  and  authority,  in  order  to  destroy  him  at  last  with 
all  the  hatred  of  disappointment — such  a  course  of  events  has 
not  left  the  slightest  trace  behind  it  in  the  Fourth  Gospel. 

Next  to  the  Prologue,  John  reveals  himself  most  clearly  as 
the  interpreter  (not  the  reporter)  of  history  in  those  insertions 
which  he  loves  to  make  in  the  substance  of  his  narrative. 
Such  additions  are  also  to  be  found  in  the  Synoptics,  especially 
when  these  describe  the  occasion  for  an  important  saying  of 
the  Lord's  (e.g.,  Luke's  '  And  the  Pharisees,  who  were  lovers  of 
money,  heard  these  things  ;  and  they  scoffed  at  him ' !),  but  they 
are  confined  to  a  few  indispensable  parentheses,  whereas  in 
John  the  writer  uses  them  to  make  his  readers  entirely  depen- 
dent upon  his  interpretation  and  his  judgment ;  ii.  21  fol.  is 
characteristic  of  this,  and  so  is  24  fol.,  '  But  Jesus  did  not 
trust  himself  unto  them,  for  that  he  knew  all  men,  and 
because  he  needed  not  that  anyone  should  bear  witness 
concerning  a  man,  for  he  himself  knew  what  was  in  man.'  - 
These  observations  of  the  writer's  are  made  in  exactly  the 
same  tone  as  the  discourses  of  Jesus,  and  it  is  impossible 
to  separate  them  from  the  context ;  occasionally  even  one 
may  seriously  doubt  whether  the  speaker  is  Jesus  or  the 
Evangelist,  and  in  i.  16-18  some  hold  it  to  be  the  Baptist, 
others  the  writer,  a  fact  which  proves  how  subjective  is  the 
character  of  the  report  and  how  completely  the  Gospel 
material  is  here  steeped  in  the  individuality  of  the  writer.  To 

1  xvi.  14,  and  cf.  xviii.  1  and  \ix.  11. 

2  Cf.  vii.  39,  x.  (i,  xi.   13,  xii.  16,  33  and  41  :     •  These  things  said  Isaiah, 
because  he  saw  his  glory,  and  he  spake  of  him,'  i.e.  Jesus. 


§  30.]  TUN    COSPEL    ACCORDING    TO    JOHN  391 

unfold  the  right  interpretation  of  Christ — that  is,  of  Christianity 
—before  his  readers'  eyes,  is  the  writer's  sole  desire,  and  there- 
fore we  cannot  expect  him  to  give  us  vivid  pictures  from  the 
life  of  Jesus  ;  he  did  not  even  succeed  in  reaching  a  living 
realisation  of  what  he  wished  to  tell,  and  hence  the  incon- 
sistencies and  self-contradictions  of  his  story  :  as  when  he 
assumes  a  thing  to  be  known  in  chapter  xi.1  which  he  only 
relates  in  chapter  xii.,  or  when  in  chapter  xvi.2  Jesus  foretells 
an  event  to  his  disciples  which  according  to  ix.  22  had  long 
since  come  to  pass. 

John's  mode  of  presentation  is  also  characterised  by  a 
remarkable  uniformity.  The  construction  of  the  sentences  is 
Hebraistic,3  and  there  is  an  entire  absence  of  the  true  period ; 
final  clauses  are  the  only  subordinates  which  are  at  all 
unusually  frequent,  and  generally  the  writer  merely  likes  to 
co-ordinate  his  principal  clauses,  while  a  sort  of  rhythmical 
solemnity  is  imparted  to  his  language  by  his  habit  of  express- 
ing his  more  important  thoughts  in  two  parallel  sentences  : 
e.g.,  '  He  that  believeth  on  me,  believeth  not  on  me,  but  on 
him  that  sent  me.  And  he  that  beholdeth  me  beholdeth  him 
that  sent  me.'  l  Or  again, '  He  that  believeth  on  the  Son  hath 
eternal  life,  but  he  that  obeyeth  not  the  Son  shall  not  see 
life.'  *  As  examples  of  his  circumstantial  mode  of  expression, 
which  cannot  indulge  too  largely  in  repetition,6  we  may  take 
i.  20,  '  And  he  confessed,  and  denied  not ;  and  he  con- 
fessed .  .  .'  or  i.  32,  where  the  words  *  And  John  bare 
witness,  saying  .  .  .'  divide  the  speech  of  John — which  is 
by  no  means  long  in  itself— quite  superfluously  into  two 
halves.  In  the  remarkably  small  vocabulary  of  the  Gospel, 
abstract  ideas,  like  '  to  believe  on,'  'to  bear  witness  of,' 
'  witness,'  '  love,'  '  life,'  are  relatively  the  best  represented, 
while  certain  concrete  words  used  in  a  metaphorical  sense, 
such  as  '  light,'  '  darkness/  '  vine,'  '  bread,'  '  water,'  have  not 
the  effect  of  a  true  image  in  vivifying  the  language,  because 
their  new  meaning  is  already  stereotyped  ;  illustrations  of  a 

1  Verse  2.  2  Verse  2. 

3  E.g.,  in  the  placing  of  the  predicate  first,  which  occurs  almost  without 
exception  :  e.g.,  xviii.  12-27. 

4  xii.  44  fol.  5  iii.  36,  and  cf.  p.  249. 
6  Cf.  xviii.  15  and  16,  and  xvii.  14b  and  16. 


392      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

parabolic  nature,  like  those  of  the  travailing  woman  of  xvi.  21, 
and  the  '  friend  of  the  bridegroom  '  of  iii.  29,  are  exceptional. 

The  most  curious  point,  however,  is  the  regular  system 
displayed  in  the  arrangement  of  the  discourses  ;  though  they 
appear  to  flow  on  spontaneously  in  conversational  form,  with 
alternating  speeches  —for  even  in  the  leave-taking  discourses 
of  chapters  xiii.-xvi.  Peter,  Thomas,  Philip  and  Judas  are  made 
to  step  in  with  separate  questions  l— they  are  in  reality  all 
made  after  the  same  pattern.  Whether  Jesus  is  conversing 
with  Nicodemus,  with  the  '  Jews,'  with  the  Samaritan  woman 
or  with  his  own  disciples,  the  process  is  the  same  :  an  introduc- 
tory question  is  answered  by  him  with  an  ambiguous  sentence - 
which  the  questioner  misunderstands  ;  Jesus  then  corrects 
the  mistake,  and  if  a  second  question  shows  that  he  has  done 
so  effectually,  he  gives  further  and  more  detailed  instruction 
on  the  subject  which  is  in  truth  his  only  one,  and  upon  the 
understanding  of  which  everything  depends.  Almost  in  the 
same  words  as  the  woman  of  Samaria,  with  her  '  Sir,  give  me 
this  water,  that  I  thirst  not,' 3  do  the  Galilaeans  beseech  him 
1  Lord,  evermore  give  us  this  bread  ' 4 ;  and  the  answers  in 
the  two  cases  are  not  less  similar.  Thus  instead  of  the  end- 
less variety  of  real  history,  what  we  find  in  John,  down  to 
the  most  trifling  details  of  form,  is  the  monotonous,  sys- 
tematising  tendency  of  an  historical  construction  as  incapable 
of  plain  narrative  as  it  is  indifferent  to  historical  detail. 

3.  It  would  seem  impossible  that  any  doubts  should  exist 
as  to  the  integrity  of  a  Gospel  whose  individual  features  are 
so  sharply  defined  aa  these.  Nevertheless  the  texts  of  all  the 
Gospels  have  come  down  to  us  in  a  state  which  leaves  free 
scope  for  a  critical  reconstruction  of  the  wording  of  individual 
passages,^  and  even  John  has  been  emendated  and  added  to 
by  the  dogmatic  tendencies  of  later  generations.  Textual 
criticism,  then,  has  long  since  decided  that  the  paragraph 

1  xiii.  36,  xiv.  5,  8  and  22  ;  cf.  xvi.  17  fol.  and  29  fol. 

2  E.g.,  ii.  19,  'Destroy  this  temple,'  etc.;  iii.  H,  '  K.\cq>t  a  man  be  born 
from  above  (&v<aQev] ' ;  iv.  10,  '  living  water  ' ;  iv.  32,  '  I  have  meat  to  eat  that 
ye  know  not.' 

3  iv.  15.  '  \\.  34. 

5  E.g.,  John  i.  18,  where  there  is  a  question  as  to  whether  we  should  read 
'  only  begotten  Son '  or  '  only  begotten  God ' ;  v.  4,  x.  8,  xxi.  25. 


§  30.]  Till']    GOSPEL    ACCORDING    TO   JOHN  393 

about  the  woman  taken  in  adultery— which  is  to  be  found,  by 
the  way,  in  two  very  different  recensions — was  interpolated 
into  the  Fourth  Gospel  by  accident  from  an  external  source ; 
very  few  old  Greek  manuscripts  contain  it,  nor  are  the 
earlier  Latin  Fathers  acquainted  with  it ;  Blass  nevertheless 
regards  it  as  an  original  part  of  his  Kornan  recension  of 
Luke,  in  which  he  complacently  finds  a  home  for  it  at  xxi.  36  ; 
Eusebius  tells  us  that  he  read  it  in  Papias  and  in  the  Gospel 
to  the  Hebrews,  and  if  Papias  endowed  it  with  the  authority 
of  a  John,  the  motive  which  induced  the  unknown  copyist 
(perhaps  in  the  third  century)  to  insert  it  into  the  Fourth 
Gospel  would  not  be  far  to  seek.  From  internal  evidence 
alone  we  should  be  obliged  to  declare  it  spurious,  for  both  in 
tone  and  diction  it  departs  very  widely  from  its  context ;  but 
neither  its  beauty  nor  its  credibility  sustains  any  injury  from 
the  removal  of  its  ' Apostolic  authority' — it  remains  the 
noblest  of  Agrapha. 

It  is  not  so  easy  to  pronounce  decisively  upon  chapter  xxi. 
At  first  sight  everyone  would  assume  it  to  be  a  supplement 
added  by  another  hand.  The  Gospel  possesses  an  admirable 
conclusion  in  the  last  two  verses  of  chapter  xx. ;  the  idea 
that  the  writer  inserted  it  when  making  the  fair  copy, 
merely  in  order  to  fill  up  a  page  which  would  otherwise 
have  remained  blank,  is  scarcely  to  be  taken  seriously,  and 
if  he  was  the  Beloved  Disciple  himself,  he  could  never  have 
forgotten  or  intentionally  have  passed  over  the  appearance 
of  the  Risen  One  related  in  chapter  xxi.  Again,  verse 
24  sounds  like  the  testimony  of  younger  disciples  con- 
cerning the  writer  of  xx.  30  and  31,  and  the  principal  object 
of  the  supplement  might  have  been  to  justify  the  death  of 
John  by  a  saying  of  Jesus,  seeing  that  it  had  occurred,  con- 
trary to  all  expectation,  before  the  Parusia.  The  locality  of 
chapter  xxi.  alone  seems  to  point  to  some  stream  of  tradi- 
tion not  otherwise  made  use  of  in  John,  for  whereas  chapter 
xx.,  like  the  Gospel  of  Luke,  tells  only  of  appearances  in 
Jerusalem,  chapter  xxi.  transfers  such  a  scene  to  the  sea  of 
Tiberias  in  Galilee.  Of  course,  the  notion  that  this  chapter 
was  taken  from  another  Gospel  and  merely  tacked  on 
to  John  is  inadmissible,  for  vv.  1  and  14  refer  distinctly 


394       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

to  chapter  xx.,  and  the  interest  of  the  narrator  in  chapter  xxi. 
is  limited  to  John's  Gospel,  which  he  merely  wished  to 
complete.  On  the  other  hand,  we  find  that  the  tradition 
knows  of  no  Fourth  Gospel  without  chapter  xxi.,  that  in 
mental  attitude,  tone  and  vocabulary  the  latter  corresponds 
entirely  with  the  Gospel  (as  in  verse  19%  for  instance,  a 
parenthetical  remark  on  the  double  meaning  of  the  miraculous 
draught  of  fish),  so  that  the  disciple  who  is  here  supposed  to 
have  added  to  the  Gospel  must  have  worked  himself  into  the 
mental  individuality  of  his  master  in  a  truly  wonderful 
manner.  He  must  even  have  known  that  master's  innermost 
intentions  better  than  the  Evangelist  himself,  for  an  essential 
part  of  the  Gospel  would  be  wanting  if,  while  xviii.  15  fol.  tell 
us  that  Peter  and  the  Beloved  Disciple  were  the  only  ones 
among  his  friends  who  followed  their  Master  after  his  arrest, 
and  xx.  2-4  that  they  alone  hastened  to  the  jgrave  on  the  first 
day  of  the  week  to  ascertain  whether  he  had  actually  quitted  it, 
yet  when  their  Lord  had  risen  again  they  were  not  held  worthy, 
like  the  Magdalene,  of  a  special  appearance  from  him.  In 
xx.  21-23,  Jesus  had  imparted  their  mission  to  his  disciples  ; 
what  special  charge  had  he  to  lay  upon  his  most  faithful 
pair?  It  is  this  question  to  which  chapter  xxi.  gives  the 
answer  ;  the  testimony  of  the  departing  Son  of  God,  that  the 
Beloved  Disciple  should  tarry  till  his  return,  sets  the  seal 
upon  the  witness  borne  by  this  disciple  throughout  the 
Gospel  to  the  Son  of  God ;  nor  are  even  vv.  24  fol.  written 
by  a  different  hand,  but  by  the  same  interpreter  to  whom 
we  owe  verse  19a.  The  last  two  verses  of  chapter  xx.  were 
not  originally  intended  as  the  ending  of  the  Gospel,  but, 
like  xix.  35,  constituted  a  sort  of  editorial  addition  inserted 
into  the  body  of  the  story,  like  the  phrase  '  He  that  hath 
ears  to  hear,  let  him  hear '  of  the  Synoptics  and  the 
Apocalypse.  It  is  perfectly  in  accordance  with  the  writer's 
manner  that  we  are  not  prepared  beforehand  for  a  change  in 
the  scene  of  the  visions  ;  as  he  appears  to  bring  the  farewell 
discourse  to  an  end  at  xiv.  31,  and  yet  takes  it  up  again  in  a 
still  more  exalted  tone  in  chapter  xv.,  so  he  appears  to  bring 
the  Kesurrection  story  to  an  end  at  xx.  31,  and  yet  adds  to  it 
one  of  its  most  important  parts ;  xx.  30  and  31  are  but  one 


§  30.]  THK    CJOSPKL    ACCORDING    TO    JOHN  395 

of  the  writer's  many  exhortations  to  his  readers  to  use  his 
book  aright ;  he  does  not  really  take  leave  of  them  until 
sxi,  24  fol. 

The  passages  in  John,  however,  which  have  been  struck 
out  by  critical  censors  are  far  from  being  confined  to  chapter  xxi. 
and  vii.  53-viii.  11.  The  schemes  for  its  dissection  are  by 
this  time  almost  innumerable.  Critics  have  attempted  to  prove 
that  whole  sections— among  others  an  account  of  the  Last 
Supper — have  disappeared  from  the  Gospel,  that  others  have 
been  moved  to  the  wrong  place,1  while  others  2  again  are  later 
interpolations.  Or  else  a  considerably  shorter  original  Gospel 
is  reconstructed  (this  view  is  held  by  Weisse,  Schweizer,  Eenan, 
Wendt  and  Delft)  by  declaring  either  the  '  Galilsean  '  sections, 
or  the  majority  of  the  miracle  stories,  or  the  great  discourses 
to  be  interpolations.  The  Prologue  is  pronounced  spurious, 
except  for  the  fragment  comprised  in  vv.  6-8,  which  is  in- 
dispensable as  an  introduction  to  i.  19  fol.,  and  as  a  witness  to 
which  the  anti-Christian  controversialist  Celsus,  who  flourished 
about  170  A.D.,  is  appealed  to ;  the  theologian  who  added 
the  remaining  verses,  it  is  contended,  did  so  with  the  intention 
of  bringing  the  Gospel  into  line  with  Alexandrian  metaphysics, 
but  not  only  did  the  want  of  connection  between  vv.  6-8 
and  what  immediately  precedes  and  follows  them  betray  the 
later  composition  of  those  parts,  but  the  two  main  ideas  of  the 
Prologue,  those  of  the  Logos  and  the  Charis,3  disappeared 
without  a  trace  in  the  rest  of  the  Gospel.  Most  of  these  sug- 
gestions are  prompted  solely  by  the  wish  to  save  at  least  a 
groundwork  of  Apostolic  authorship  for  the  Gospel,  even  though 
the  whole  of  it  could  not  be  ascribed  to  the  Apostle  ;  but  such  a 
wish,  as  the  starting-point  for  critical  hypotheses,  is  extremely 
suspicious.  These  hypotheses  must,  however,  be  rejected  in 
toto,  because  they  do  not  take  into  account  the  similarity  both  in 
form  and  matter  which  extends  to  every  part  of  the  Gospel— 
for  even  the  miracle  stories  are  indissolubly  connected  with  the 
discourses  that  precede  and  follow  them.4  The  Prologue  is  the 

1  E.g.,  vv.  vii.  15-24  and  chaps,  xv.  and  xvi.,  the  proper  places  for  which 
are  said  to  be  respectively  between  v.  47  and  vi.  1,  and  after  ver.  xiii.  31». 

2  E.g.,  vi.  51-59. 

3  Vv.  14,  16  and  17.  4  E.g.,  chaps,  ix.  and  xi. 


396       AN    INTKODUCTION   TO    THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

most  indispensable  part  of  all ;  it  bears  the  very  stamp  both 
of  the  other  explanatory  insertions  of  the  Evangelist  and  of  the 
Johannine  discourses  of  Jesus ;  but  the  writer  was  prevented 
by  the  fineness  of  his  tact  from  putting  a  Greek  philosophical 
term  like  '  the  Word  '  into  the  mouth  of  Jesus  himself  or  even 
of  his  disciples,  and  wherever  Jesus  speaks  the  general  term 
'  grace  '  is  replaced,  in  accordance  with  the  old  tradition,  by  the 
more  particular  '  salvation '  (crojfgt^,  o-wrrjp,  aayrrjpla).  Add 
to  this  that  it  is  impossible  to  discover  any  obvious  motive 
for  the  interpolations.  The  irregularities  and  contradictions 
which  are  relied  upon  to  support  such  hypotheses  are  the 
very  characteristics  of  John.1  The  critics  too  often  set  up  the 
standard  of  their  own  logic,  their  own  attention  to  details, 
their  own  demand  for  a  correct  succession  of  events,  in 
short,  a  Gospel  such  as  they  themselves  would  write  it,  as  their 
guide,  whereas  the  task  which  John  set  himself  (that  of 
carrying  out  his  ideal  of  the  Christ  in  the  actual  history  of 
Jesus,  and  of  using  materials  drawn  from  a  tradition  still 
partly  entangled  in  the  things  of  the  flesh  for  the  repre- 
sentation of  a  spiritual  Christ)  was  not  attainable  without 
certain  inconsistencies,  since  the  form  prescribed  was  far  too 
inflexible  for  the  new  matter  it  was  to  contain. 

4.  (a)  In  order  to  ascertain  the  date  at  which  the  Fourth 
Gospel  was  composed,  we  must  first  examine  its  relation  to  the 
other  Gospels  we  possess,  i.e.  the  Synoptics.  It  is  almost 
universally  regarded  as  certain  that  John  was  a  later  produc- 
tion, because  the  Synoptics  are  all  utilised  in  it.  It  is  true 
that  the  differences  between  them  are  far  more  extensive  than 
the  points  of  agreement,  for,  apart  from  the  Passion  story,  only 
a  very  few  passages  of  John  are  unquestionably  paralleled  in 
the  Synoptics— of  the  discourses,  indeed,  practically  none  but 
xii.  25-31 — and  of  course  any  literal  copying-down  of  an  earlier 
document  is  not  to  be  thought  of  in  the  case  of  a  writer  wl  i  <  • 
dealt  with  his  material  in  so  independent  a  fashion;  but 
sufficient  traces  have  nevertheless  remained  of  his  acquaint- 
ance with  the  older  works.  In  the  story  of  the  anointing 
(xii.  1-11),  verse  8  is  word  for  word  identical  with  Matt.  xxvi. 
11,  which  is  itself  an  abbreviation  of  Mark  xiv.  7  ;  in  verse  7 

1  See  pp.  246  and  Ml. 


§  30.]  THE    GOSPEL   ACCORDING   TO   JOHN  397 

Jesus  speaks  of  his  being  anointed  for  burial  in  much  the  same 
manner  as  in  Mark  8  and  Matthew  12,  while  the  selling  of  the 
ointment  for  three  hundred  pence  and  the  deprecating  *  Let 
her  alone  '  are  shared  by  John  with  Mark  only.  Finally,  the 
remarkable  identity  in  the  description  of  the  ointment,  where 
the  dependence  of  the  one  on  the  other  is  indisputable,1  leaves 
no  further  room  for  doubt.  The  dependent  writer  can,  how- 
ever, only  be  John,  for  instead  of  following  Mark  and 
Matthew  in  saying  that  the  ointment  was  poured  over  the 
head  of  Jesus,  he  relates  how  Mary  anointed  the  feet  of  Christ 
and  wiped  them  with  her  hair — a  trait  taken  practically  word 
for  word  from  Luke's  account,2  which  is  itself  a  variant  of  the 
story  based  upon  Mark.  In  the  same  way  we  may  observe  in 
comparing  John's  description  of  the  Entry  into  Jerusalem,3 
or  of  the  feeding  of  the  five  thousand,4  or  even  large  parts  of 
his  story  of  the  Passion,5  with  their  Synoptic  equivalents,  that 
John,  though  never  binding  himself  slavishly  to  his  predeces- 
sors, is  yet  influenced  by  them  even  in  matters  of  expression. 
All  other  explanations  of  these  facts  are  unsatisfactory,  since 
the  points  of  agreement  between  John  and  the  three  Synop- 
tists  are  inextricably  intertwined,  and  extend  to  the  peculiar 
property  of  each.  This  relationship  alone,  then,  will  prevent  us 
from  assigning  the  Fourth  Gospel  to  any  date  before  100  A.D. 
(6)  That  John  made  use  of  the  Pauline  Epistles  in  the 
same  way  as  he  employed  the  Synoptics  cannot  be  asserted 
with  so  much  confidence.  It  is  true  that  in  reading  his  work 
we  are  reminded  often  enough  of  Pauline  ideas  and  phrases- 
most  frequently  of  those  of  Romans,0  Corinthians  and 
Ephesians— and  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  too,  might  have 
been  known  to  him  ;  but  we  must  not  expect  to  find  in  his 
work  any  literal  transcripts  from  these  writings.  His  theo- 
logical position  certainly  implies  a  knowledge  of  the  Pauline 

1  John  has  pvpov  vdptiov  7ri<m/c7Js  iro\vTi/j.ov ;  Mark  is  identical,  except  for 
the  word  iro\vr€\ovs  for  TTO\UTI/AOI/,  and  Matthew  has  pvpov  fiapv  r  i /j.  o  v. 

2  Luke  vii.  37-50. 

3  John  xii.  12  etc. ;  Mark  xi.  1-11 ;  Matt.  xxi.  1-11 ;  Luke  xix.  29  etc. 

4  John  vi.  1-14  ;  Mark  vi.  30 ;  Matt.  xiv.  13  ;  Luke  ix.  10. 

s  John  xviii.,  e.g.,  the  judgment  of  Pilate,  ovtie/j.iav  fvplo-icw  eV  avrf  airiav, 
beside  Luke  xxiii.  4,  ovScv  (vpiaitci)  afnov  eV  r<f  aj>6pu>Tr<i)  rovrtp,  and  especially 
xix.  1-3,  15-19,  29  and  38. 

6  Cf .  John  viii.  34  and  Horn.  vi.  16 ;  John  xii.  38  and  Rom.  x.  16. 


398       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

teaching  ;  he  presents  us  with  a  modification  of  the  Pauline 
theology  characteristic  of  a  time  when  the  great  differences  of 
the  first  period  were  overcome,  when  compromise  was  no 
longer  possible  with  Judaism,  and  when  Christianity  had  long 
begun  to  feel  itself  a  new  religion,  or  rather  the  religion  in 
contradistinction  to  the  godlessness  of  the  world.  Paul  and 
the  Apocalypse  still  look  upon  the  name  of  '  Jew '  as  a  title  of 
honour,  which  they  were  by  no  means  inclined  to  surrender  to 
the  unbelieving  Hebrews  ;  John,  on  the  other  hand,  regards 
'  the  Jews '  from  the  very  beginning  as  a  body  alien  and 
hostile  to  the  Lord  and  his  followers,  and  this  evidently 
represents  the  state  of  things  which  existed  when  he  wrote  the 
Gospel.  The  two  main  theses  of  Paul,  those  of  the  universality 
of  salvation  and  of  the  freedom  of  faith  from  the  Law,  have 
entered  into  the  writer's  very  marrow  ;  in  v.  11  we  are  told 
that  the  Son  *  quickeneth  whom  he  will,'  and  xi.  52  is  still 
more  explicit.1  We  read  of  Samaritans  and  Greeks  as  well  as 
'  true  Israelites  '  pressing  to  hear  him,  and  behind  the  words 
about  the  one  flock  and  the  one  shepherd,2  and  the  prayer 
*  that  they  may  be  one,' 3  the  idea  rises  up  distinctly  of  the 
one  Church  in  which  there  were  no  distinguishing  degrees  ; 
John  could  never  have  written  those  words  of  the  Epistle  to 
the  Romans  about  the  '  advantage '  of  the  Jew.4  The  man 
who  points  the  contrast  between  the  law  given  by  Moses  and 
the  grace  and  truth  which  came  by  Jesus  Christ,5  or  between 
Moses,  who  was  not  the  giver  of  the  '  bread  from  heaven,' 
and  the  Father  who  gave  the  true  bread  from  heaven  in  the 
person  of  the  Son  he  sent  into  the  world ;  the  man  who 
claims  obedience  only  for  the  commandments  or  command- 
ment of  Jesus 7  and  repeatedly  designates  the  Law  as  the  Law 
of  the  Jews  8 — such  a  man  had  not  only  broken  with  Judaism 
in  his  own  person,  but  in  his  time  the  Church  had  long  ceased 
to  be  concerned  with  questions  of  circumcision,  Sabbath  - 
observance  and  forbidden  meats.  The  Johannine  theology 
arose  through  the  simplification  of  the  Pauline  ;  it  allowed  a 

1  Cf.  x.  16  and  xvii.  C.  -  x.  16.  3  xvii.  11  and  22. 

1  rb  irfpi<T(rbi/  TOV  'louSatou,  Horn.  iii.  1.  5  i.  17. 

6  vi.  32. 

7  xiv.  15  and  21,  xv.  10  and  12,  or  verse  xiii.  34,  '  the  new  commandment 
(cf.  xii.  49  fol.).  8  viii.  17,  x.  34,  xv.  25. 


§  30.]  Till:    (iOSl'KL,    ACCOKDING    TO    JOHN  399 

number  of  favourite  Pauline  theories,  like  the  self -abrogation 
of  the  Law,  or  the  atoning  power  of  Christ's  death  upon  the 
Cross,  to  drop,  because  they  were  no  longer  necessary  ;  the 
process  of  salvation  is  imu-h  less  complicated  with  John  than 
it  is  with  Paul,  for  the  substance  of  John's  story  consists  in 
nothing  but  the  perpetual  struggle  between  the  flesh  and  the 
spirit,  the  Father  and  the  world,  darkness  and  light.  The 
descent  into  the  world  of  the  only-begotten  Son,  who  offered  the 
highest  good  to  all  men  and  demonstrated  his  divinity  in  the 
clearest  way,  necessarily  put  an  end  in  principle  to  this 
struggle  ;  the  hitherto  commingled  elements  separated  them- 
selves ;  to  see  Jesus  was  to  see  the  Father,1  and  meant  truth 
and  life,  and  whoever  denied  this  henceforth  was  lost  beyond 
all  further  help,  while  he  who  recognised  it  aright  possessed 
all  things  therein. 

The  absolute  significance  of  the  Person  of  Christ  is  still 
more  sharply  emphasised  here  than  it  is  by  Paul ;  the  image 
of  the  Jewish  Messiah  is  completely  lost  sight  of,  and  the 
pre-existing  Messiah  of  Paul,  who  renounced  his  Godhead, 
assumed  the  image  of  man,  and  humbled  himself  so  low  for 
the  purposes  of  God  that  God  rewarded  him  by  exalting  him 
still  higher,  giving  him  the  name  of  Lord  and  judging  him 
worthy  of  adoration,  becomes  with  John  the  '  Word '  that  was 
with  God  from  all  eternity,  the  creator  of  the  world,  who 
allowed  his  glory  to  be  seen  for  a  short  time  in  the  flesh,  and 
then  returned  again  to  the  Father,  not  to  new  honours,  but  to 
the  place  he  had  occupied  of  old,  where  he  was  now  preparing 
the  abode  of  his  faithful  flock.  Here,  too,  beside  the  ancient 
phrase  '  that  the  Scripture  might  be  fulfilled,' 2  we  find 
another  taking  equal  rank  with  it — '  that  the  word  of  Jesus 
might  be  fulfilled ' ;! ;  Jesus,  in  fact,  decides  his  own  fate  and 
determines  what  is  his  ;  xii.  48,  where  the  role  of  the  world's 
judge  is  given  to  the  word  which  Jesus  speaks,  is  another 
case  in  point :  one  might  almost  be  tempted,  indeed,  to  draw 
a  parallel  between  it  and  the  Word  of  God  which  assumes  the 

1  xiv.  9  fol. 

2  E.g.,  xiii.  18,  xvii.  12,   xix.  24  and  36  ;    and  cf.   xii.   38   and   xv.   25, 
'iva  ir\-npu>0r)  6  \6yos  6  ev  T$  vu^u)  avruv  yfypafj.iJ.fvos. 

3  xviii.  9  and  32,  which  refer  back  to  xvii.  12  and  xii.  32  fol. 


400       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

part  of  the  world's  Creator  in  i.  8.  The  deification  of  Jesus, 
for  which  Paul  had  opened  the  way,  was  inexorably  carried  out 
by  John  to  its  furthest  conclusion,  and  this  alone  should  be 
enough  to  set  all  doubts  at  rest  as  to  the  relative  dates  of  the 
two  theologians.  In  the  domain  of  eschatology,  too,  the 
riddance  of  Jewish  realism  which  Paul  had  failed  to  effect 
is  completed  in  principle  by  John.  Although  the  old 
forms  of  expression  are  still  preserved,1  the  writer  has  no 
place  for  a  Last  Judgment  dividing  the  blessed  from  the 
damned  and  for  a  period  of  sleep  before  the  general  resurrec- 
tion— still  less  for  a  thousand  years'  reign  within  the  limits 
of  the  earth ;  in  his  eyes  Jesus  had  already 2  bestowed 
the  glory  which  he  had  received  from  the  Father  upon  his 
followers  ;  they  possessed  eternal  life,  because  they  were  no 
longer  of  the  world.  Even  their  separation  from  Jesus 
could  not  disturb  their  joy  and  peace,  for  they  had  received  in 
his  stead  the  spirit  of  truth,  which  led  them  even  higher  into 
the  realms  of  truth  and  produced  in  them  the  power  to  do  yet 
mightier  works  than  Jesus  himself  had  done.  Death  for  the 
Christian,  as  for  Christ  himself,  meant  exaltation,  and  Jesus  by 
his  death  *  drew  all  men  unto  him.' 

Such  a  transformation  of  the  Gospel  as  understood  by 
Paul  would  only  have  been  possible  a  considerable  time  after 
Paul's  death,  and  the  fact  that  it  was  produced  under  the 
unmistakable  influence  of  Greek  philosophising  speaks  still 
more  strongly  for  the  relatively  late  composition  of  the  Fourth 
Gospel.  We  may  doubt  the  direct  dependence  of  John  upon 
the  Tractates  of  Philo,  but  his  spiritualism,  his  love  for  sym- 
bolic reasoning,  and  the  whole  fund  of  ideas  with  which  he 
works  prove  his  intellectual  affinity  to  the  Alexandrians,  and 
his  conception  of  the  all -creating  Logos  points  in  the  same 
direction. 

Nevertheless,  we  have  already  recognised  a  similar  com- 
bination between  the  theological  ideas  of  Alexandria  and  the 
fundamental  principles  of  Paul  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews, 
which  is  most  probably  of  earlier  origin  than  Luke  or  Matthew. 
The  arguments  drawn  from  the  theological  attitude  of  John, 
indeed,  lead  us  but  to  a  terminus  a  quo  at  about  70  A.D.,  though 

1  E.g.,  xii.  48.  -  xvii.  22.  3  xii.  32. 


$30.]  TIIK    UOSI'KI.    Aro>KDING   TO   JOHN  401 

this  must  subsequently  be  brought  down  to  the  end  of  the  first 
Century  through  the  dependence  of  John  on  the  Synoptics. 
It  is  more  important  to  determine  the  terminus  ad  quern,  and 
here  the  means  at  our  command  do  not  permit  us  to  say 
of  the  Gospel  alone  more  than  *  at  latest  from  100  to  125.' 
The  Gnostic  school  of  Valentine,  which  flourished  from  ISO 
onwards,  was  greatly  influenced  by  the  Fourth  Gospel  from 
its  very  beginning,  and  one  of  its  members,  Heracleon,  wrote 
the  first  commentary  upon  it  about  the  year  170.  The 
Montanists,1  again,  were  very  fond  of  using  all  the  Johannine 
writings  as  their  authorities.  I  therefore  believe  that  I  am 
justified  by  an  anjn-mentum  e  silentio  in  giving  the  date  some- 
what more  precisely  as  from  100  to  110.  The  school  of  Baur 
has  indeed  discovered  that  both  Gnosticism  and  Montanism 
are  referred  to  in  the  Fourth  Gospel,  but  in  reality  we  are 
-iruds  by  the  negative  relation  in  which  it  stands  towards 
( i  nosticism ;  its  author  was  not  dreaming  of  carrying  on  a 
campaign  against  the  fundamental  ideas  of  the  Gnostic  system. 
Words  with  a  Gnostic  ring,  however,  are  not  entirely  absent 
from  the  Fourth  Gospel,  such  as  x.  8,  '  All  that  came  before 
me  are  thieves  and  robbers  ' — though  naturally  the  '  all '  does 
not  imply,  as  Marcion  contends,  a  condemnation  of  the  Old 
Testament  Prophets,  but  is  limited  to  those  who  pretended  to 
come  as  shepherds,  lords  of  the  flock,  i.e.  as  pseudo-Christs. 
John  the  Baptist  would  have  been  such  a  thief  if  he  had  not 
been  the  very  opposite  of  what  the  enemies  of  Christianity 
sought  to  paint  him.  But  with  a  reasonable  exegesis  all  that 
remains  of  the  so-called  Gnosticism  of  John  are  the  facts 
that  he  sets  an  unusually  high  value  upon  knowledge,  that, 
like  many  Gnostic  systems,  the  Fourth  Gospel  may  be  called 
an  unconscious  attempt  to  give  the  elements  of  Hellenic 
culture  the  preponderating  influence  in  Christianity  over  the 
remains  of  Jewish  thought  and  feeling,  and  that  the  mono- 
tonous, didactic  tone  which  so  sharply  distinguishes  the 
Gospel  of  John  from  the  vernacular  freshness  of  the  Syn- 
optics, as  also  the  writer's  preference  for  abstract  ideas  and 
his  love  of  introducing  symbols  like  those  of  water,  bread  or 
wine — these  things  do  occasionally  remind  us  of  Gnostic 
1  From  160  onwards. 

D  D 


402       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT       [CHAP.   i. 

productions.  All  other  points  of  contact  with  Gnostic  writers, 
certain  phrases  bordering  on  Docetism  in  reference  to  the- 
bodily  nature  of  Jesus,  the  dissolution  in  the  Prologue  of  the 
pure  Monotheistic  idea,  the  dualistic  foundation  of  the  Gospel, 
these  belong  in  an  equal  degree  to  most  of  the  other  ecclesi- 
astical writers  of  that  time.  But  the  fact  that  the  Fourth 
Evangelist  could  write  a  Gospel  with  a  purpose  (Tendenz- 
Evangeliuni)  without  a  trace  of  anti-Gnostic  purpose, 
surely  shows  that  Gnosticism  had  not  as  yet  begun  to 
be  a  serious  danger  to  the  Church,  or  at  any  rate  to  that 
part  of  it  which  lay  within  his  field  of  view.  The  Gospel 
of  John  thus  appears  to  lie  before  Jude  and  the  Pastoral 
Epistles. 

But  with  this  we  come  to  the  all-important  question  as  to 
the  authorship  of  John,  upon  a  right  solution  of  which  ou 
understanding  of  its  nature,  purpose  and  value  depends  in 
far   greater   degree   than  is  usually   the  case   with   such 
problem. 


§  31.  The  Jolianninc  Question 

[Besides  the  books  mentioned  in  the  foregoing  section, 
E.  Schurer's  '  Uber  den  gegenwartigen  Stand  der  johanneischen 
Frage  '  (1889),  and,  following  upon  this,  A.  Meyer's  '  Die  Behand- 
lung  der  johanneischen  Frage  im  letzten  Jahrzehnt,'  in  the 
'  Theologische  Kundschau  '  for  1899,  part  ii.  pp.  255-263,  295-305 
and  333-345.  Also  P.  Corssen's  '  Monarchianische  Prologe  zu  den 
4  Evangelien,'  in  '  Texte  und  Untersuchungen'  xv.  1,  1896,  esp. 
pp.  103-117.] 

1.  Ever  since,  in  1820,  Prof.  K.  G.  Bretschneider  brought 
forward  strong  reasons  for  declaring  it  impossible  to  conceive 
the  Fourth  Gospel  as  the  work  of  an  Apostle,  the  dispute  as 
to  whether  the  tradition  were  right  or  wrong  has  become  ever 
keener.  The  orthodox  opinion,  that  in  his  old  age  the 
Apostle  John,  the  son  of  Zebedee,  wrote  his  Gospel  at  Ephesus 
as  a  last  testament  to  the  Church,  is  held  by  the  one  side  as 
positively  as  it  is  rejected  by  the  other. 

The  favourite  argument  for  the  Fourth  Gospel's  Apostolic- 
authorship  is  the  particularly  distinct  and  early  attestatio 


§31.  THM    -lOHAXMNK    (Jl  KSTK'.N  403 

of  it.     It  is  certainly  true  th.it  wherever  John  was  used  in  the 
Church  from  the  third  century  onwards,  it  was  regarded  as  the 
work  of  the  son  of  Zehedee  ;  only  the  Alogi  of  Asia  Minor 
rejected  it,  even  before  the  end  of  the  second  century,  hut  that 
was    scarcely  on  the  ground  of  better  or  even  of  divergent 
tradition  ;  their  contemporaries  Irenaeus  and  the  author  of  the 
Muratorian  Fragment,  whose  dogmatic  ideas  took  no  exception 
to  the  book,  had  no  doubt  whatever  that  it  originated  with  the 
Apostle  John.     The  still  older  traces  of  acquaintanceship  with 
John  prove  nothing  either   way,  because  no  statements  are 
made    concerning   its   author.      For   instance,   although   in 
Iren&us  V.  xxxvi.  '2,  the  '  Presbyters  '  quote  the  words  '  In  my 
Father's  house  are  many  mansions  '  as  a  Saying  of  the  Lord, 
it  is  certainly  probable  that  they  had  read  those  words  in  the 
Fourth  Gospel ;  but  this  does  not  help  us  in  any  way  to  decide 
under  what  name  they  read  that  Gospel.     It  is  our  duty  to 
examine  the  tradition  narrowly,  and  to  test  its  various  con- 
stituents according  to  their  antiquity.     Thus  it  is  proved  by 
the  absolutely  trustworthy  testimony  of  Irenaeus,1  that  about 
the  year  130  Poly  carp  boasted  of  the  fact  that  he  had  known 
and  had  intercourse  with  John  and  others  who  had  seen  the 
Lord.      No  one  has  any  doubt  that  by  this   John  Irenseus 
meant  the  son  of  Zebedee,  the  same  whom  he  mentions  in 
II.  xxii.  5  as  the  witness  for  a  fragment  of  tradition  concerning 
Jesus ;  and  in  III.  i.  1  he  declares  expressly  that  this  John,  the 
disciple  who  leaned  on  Jesus'  breast,  published  the  Gospel  at 
Ephesus  in  Asia.     Innumerable  witnesses  now  follow  in  his 
train,  whose  information  as  to  the  occasion  for  this  production 
and  especially  as  to  the  reason  why  the  Apostle  took  up  his 
pen  even  after  the  Church  had  received  three  Gospels  from 
the  hands  of  Apostles  or  of  their  disciples,  becomes  more  and 
more   precise.     Thus  about  the  year  200,  Clement  of  Alex- 
andria -  had  heard  from  older  authorities  that  after  the  other 
Evangelists  had  imparted  the  corporeal  Gospel,  John  had  at 
the  instigation  of  his  friends  and  in  the  might  of  inspiration 
created  a  spiritual  Gospel.     Thus  a  satisfactory  formula  was 
at  the  same  time  provided  for  the  enormous  difference — of 

1  Euseb.  Hist.  AYcks.  V.  u.  4.  -  Ibid.  VI.  xiv.  5  and  7. 

D    D   2 


404         AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  I. 

which  even  that  age  must  have  been  sensible  to  a  certain 
extent — between  the  picture  of  Christ  given  by  the  Synoptics 
and  that  given  by  John. 

Apart  from  this  distinction,  however,  between  the  corporeal 
and  spiritual  Gospel,  the  information  concerning  John  in  the 
Fragment  of  Muratori  agrees  with  that  of  the  '  authorities  '  of 
Clement.  The  author  of  the  Fragment,  however,  takes  greater 
pains  to  prove  the  rank  of  the  Fourth  Evangelist  as  eye-witness, 
and  the  unity  of  spirit  in  all  four  Gospels,  and  he  gives  a  more 
romantic  description  of  its  origin  ]  ;  he  represents  the  fellow- 
Apostles  of  John  as  urging  him  to  write,  and  relates  how  it 
was  revealed  to  the  Apostle  Andrew  that  John  was  to  record 
everything  under  a  sort  of  joint  responsibility  of  all,  but  in 
his  own  name.  According  to  this  account,  then,  the  writing 
of  the  Gospel  could  only  be  placed  at  Jerusalem  and  before  the 
year  66,  since  the  other  Apostles  were  still  alive  ;  but  not  only 
does  Eusebius  -  assign  the  Gospel  to  the  period  of  John's 
extreme  old  age  (declaring  him,  moreover,  to  have  been 
actuated  by  the  desire  of  filling  up  the  gap  left  by  the 
Synoptics  in  the  first  half  of  the  history  of  Jesus),  but  even 
the  much  earlier  Irenaeus  seems  to  have  held  this  view,  and 
he  certainly  looked  upon  Ephesus  as  the  place  of  its  composi- 
tion. The  'Historia  Ecclesiastica,'  somewhat  freely  recon- 
structed by  Corssen,3  tells  us  that  on  his  return  from  Patmos 
to  Ephesus  after  the  death  of  Domitian,  and  at  the  request  of 
Jill  the  bishops  of  Asia  and  of  deputations  from  many  com- 
munities, the  virgin  apostle  John  wrote  in  an  exalted  style 
concerning  the  divinity  of  Christ,  in  order  to  provide  a  bulwark 
against  Cerinthus,  Ebion  and  others  who  denied  the  pre- 
existence  of  Christ ;  that  after  a  solemn  fast  in  which  all  par- 
took, a  revelation  had  been  vouchsafed  to  him  in  consequence 
of  which  he  felt  empowered  to  write  down  things  worthy  of  the 
Lord.  The  Monarchian  prologue  to  John  of  the  third  century, 
which  was  discovered  in  1895,4  assumes  as  well  known  that, 
although  the  Fourth  Gospel  occupied  the  xe-cond  place,  it  was 
written  last  of  all,  and  written  by  the  Apostle  John  after  he 
had  written  his  Apocalypse  on  the  island  of  Patmos. 

1  Li,  '  Hist.  Ecdcs.  III.  xxiv.  7. 

3  Textc  und  Untcrsuchiinyni.  XV.  8  4  Ibid.  p.  6. 


.MMIANMNK  ori;sTi<>.\  -105 

All  other  tradition  rum-oming  the  Gospel  is  dependent  on 
the  above-named  sources  ;  and  are  these  particularly  remark- 
able for  their  antiquity  and  credibility '?  So  far  as  their 
statements  do  not  contradict  one  another,  they  are  obvious 
legends  invented  according  to  the  taste  of  the  age  in  order  to 
convince  the  world  of  the  author's  inspiration  and  of  the 
exalted  nature  of  his  motives  in  writing ;  the  yvwpifjioi  of 
Clement,  for  instance,  and  the  '  condiscipuli '  of  the  Canon  of 
Muratori  were  of  course  deduced  from  i.  14.  and  xxi.  24 — *  we 
behold '  and  '  we  know.'  For  the  rest,  all  we  know  is  that 
from  the  year  180  onwards  John  was  almost  universally 
recognised  in  the  Church  as  the  work  of  the  Apostle  John  who 
died  at  Ephesus. 

But  the  fact  that  the  same  men  without  exception  ascribe 
the  Apocalypse  with  equal  confidence  to  the  same  John,  although 
it  is  impossible  seriously  to  suppose  that  these  two  works  are 
from  the  hand  of  a  single  author,  makes  us  somewhat 
suspicious  of  their  information  ;  if  we  were  obliged  to  choose, 
we  should  give  the  preference  to  the  Apocalypse,  which  is 
attested  by  Justin  (about  the  year  155)  as  being  the  work 
of  the  Apostle  John.  It  is  certainly  true,  however,  that 
Irenaeus  was  not  the  man  to  spin  traditions  out  of  his  own 
brain.  He  appeals  to  Polycarp,  who  in  his  turn  declares  that 
he  had  had  trustworthy  information  concerning  the  Lord 
Jesus  from  the  eye-witness  John.  We  do  not  mistrust  either 
of  the  two,  but  it  is  most  certain  that  this  statement  does 
not  constitute  Polycarp  a  witness  to  the  Evangelist  John. 
Those  who  picture  the  matter  in  the  following  light — that, 
when  Irenaeus  as  a  boy  heard  the  aged  Polycarp  preach 
and  tell  of  his  experiences,  he  asked  him  whether  the  disciple 
of  whom  he  was  thus  speaking  were  the  same  as  he  who  had 
written  the  wonderful  Logos-Gospel,  and  that  Polycarp  there- 
upon made  him  a  kindly  sign  of  assent — such  may  look  upon 
the  chain  of  tradition  from  Jesus  to  Irenaeus,  through  John 
and  Polycarp,  as  marvellously  complete;  but  others  must 
consider  it  equally  possible,  precisely  because  Irenaeus  does 
not  appeal  to  Polycarp  as  a  witness  to  the  Fourth  Gospel, 
that  on  the  occasion  of  this  visit  the  young  Irenaeus  was  a- 
yet  unacquainted  with  that  Gospel.  The  one  fact  established 


406        AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NKW    TBSTAMKNT     [CHAP.  i. 

by  Polycarp  is  that  a  disciple  named  John  sojourned  in  Asia 
for  a  considerable  time ;  since  he  alone  among  other  eye- 
witnesses is  mentioned  by  name,  he  must  have  been  a 
conspicuous  personage  and  have  possessed  unusual  authority  ; 
he  must  also  have  lived  to  a  great  age,  since  he  met  the  heretic 
Cerinthus  in  the  Baths  of  Ephesus,1  and  his  death  occurred, 
as  Irenaeus  expressly  asserts,  in  the  early  years  of  the  reign 
of  Trajan.  That  this  John  was  buried  at  Ephesus  is  told  by- 
Poly  crates,  Bishop  of  that  city,  about  the  year  190 2 ;  he  adds 
the  words  '  He  who  lay  on  the  Lord's  breast '  and  extols  him 
as  Witness  and  Teacher  (this  probably  in  reference  to  the 
Apocalypse  and  the  Epistles),  while  he  also  adds  the  mys- 
terious title  '  Priest  who  wore  the  brow-band.' 

Unfortunately,  however,  at  the  critical  point  in  Irenaeus'B 
book  this  John  of  Asia  is  merely  designated  as  a  '  disciple  of 
the  Lord,'  and  not  as  *  one  of  the  Twelve/  as  the  '  son  of 
Zebedee  '  or  as  '  the  Apostle.'  Considering  the  frequency  of 
the  name  of  John,  then,  this  pillar  of  the  Asiatic  Church 
might  after  all  have  been  another  than  the  son  of  Zebedee. 
As  early  as  the  year  260,  indeed,  Dionysius  of  Alexandria 
proposed  to  distinguish  two  Asiatic  teachers  of  the  name  of 
John,  since  two  graves  of  John  were  shown  at  Ephesus — the 
one  perhaps  being  the  author  of  the  Apocalypse,  and  the 
other,  of  course,  the  great  Apostle  who  wrote  the  Gospel  and 
the  Epistles.  Eusebius,  who  is  still  less  favourably  inclined 
than  Dionysius  towards  the  Apocalypse,  joyfully  agrees 
this  hypothesis,3  and  urges  in  support  of  it  the  testimon 
of  Papias,  who  throughout  his  five  books  frequently  call 
himself  a  hearer  (avrr)Koos)  of  a  *  Presbyter  '  John  whom  he 
clearly  distinguished  from  the  Apostle  (and  Evangelist,  adds 
Eusebius).  This  distinction  is,  in  fact,  unavoidable,  unless 
indeed  one  were  so  frivolous  as  to  credit  Eusebius  with  wilful 
falsification,  or  else  so  fanatical  a  Eusebian  as  to  ascribe 
to  Papias,  merely  because  Eusebius  calls  him  a  man  of 
limited  intelligence,  the  manner  of  speech  of  a  child  of 
eight  or  of  a  greybeard  of  ninety,  who  forget  what  they 
have  said  within  a  minute  of  saying  it.  Papias  is  reported 

1  Iren.  III.  iii.  4.  -  F.useb.  JFist.  Kcdes.  V.  \xiv.  15. 

3  Tbitl.  III.  xxxix.  f>  fol. 


led 

to 

>ny 

led 


§  31.]  T1IK    .JOI1ANMM-:    IJUKSTION  40 


by  Eusebius  !  to  have  written,  in  describing  his  fruitful  efforts 
to  obtain  authentic  information  concerning  the  Lord  and  his 
teaching,  the  following  words  :  '  If  I  met  with  anyone  who 
had  been  a  follower  of  the  elders  anywhere,  I  made  it  a 
point  to  inquire  what  were  the  declarations  of  the  elders, 
what  was  said  by  Andrew,  Peter  or  Philip,  what  by  Thomas, 
James,  John,  Matthew  or  any  other  of  the  disciples  of  our 
Lord,  and  what  is  said  by  Aristion  and  the  Presbyter  John,  the 
disciples  of  the  Lord.'  It  is  clear  that  Papias  here  sets  the 
Presbyter  John,  mentioned  after  Aristion,  nearly  on  the  same 
level  as  that  other  John  whom  he  places  before  Matthew  ;  but 
the  context  establishes  it  beyond  question  that  the  latter  is 
meant  for  the  son  of  Zebedee,  while  the  other  does  not  belong 
to  the  circle  of  the  Twelve  any  more  than  does  Aristion. 
On  both  Johns  are  bestowed  the  honourable  titles  of  '  Disciple 
of  the  Lord  '  and  '  Elder,'  for  both  were  representatives  of 
the  first  Christian  generation  —that  of  the  eye-witnesses.  But 
while  the  one  had  said,  the  other  was  still  saying,  and  it 
is  therefore  implied  that  he  was  alive  at  the  time  of  Papias's 
investigations  —  though  whether  Papias  held  any  direct  inter- 
course with  him  is  not  stated,  at  any  rate  in  this  passage  — 
and  since  the  John  mentioned  in  the  midst  of  none  but 
Apostles  can  scarcely  be  any  other  than  the  famous  Apostle, 
the  son  of  Zebedee,  it  is  obvious  that  the  surviving  John  was 
no  Apostle,  but  merely  a  '  Presbyter.' 

Papias,  then,  said  nothing  of  any  Evangelist  John  ;  had 
he  done  so,  Eusebius  would  scarcely  have  kept  his  knowledge 
of  such  a  fact  to  himself,  and  the  recent  childish  hypothesis 
that  John  dictated  his  Gospel  to  Papias  is  hardly  worth  a 
mention.  But  Papias  places  the  son  of  Zebedee  in  the 
majestic  list  of  the  Apostles  from  whose  lips  he  had  still 
been  able  indirectly  to  procure  utterances  ;  side  by  side  with 
him,  however,  another  John,  who  was  an  Elder  too,  but  also 
his  own  contemporary  and  one  of  his  chief  authorities.  If 
the  son  of  Zebedee  had  lived  at  Ephesus  —  that  is,  in  the 
neighbourhood  of  Papias  —  down  to  the  time  of  Trajan,  we 
should  expect  that  the  latter,  in  his  thirst  for  information, 
would  have  made  use  of  him  to  a  very  considerable  extent  ; 

1  Hist.  Kcclcs.  III.  xxxix.  4. 


408         AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    Till:    NK\V    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  I.. 

but  now  it  seems  as  though  our  informant  never  approached 

any  nearer  to  him  than  he  did,  say,  to  Thomas  or  Matthew, 

Papias  does  riot  breathe  a  syllable  of  the  two  Johns  in  Asia 

whose  existence   Eusebius   concluded  from  this  passage  :  he 

merely  tells  us  of  two  disciples  and  elders  named  John.     And 

since  the  inventors  of  the  hypothesis  of  the  two  Johns  had 

an  all  too  obvious  interest  in  doing  so,  and  since  the  story 

of  the  two  graves  at  Ephesus  will  scarcely  impose  upon  any 

historian   acquainted   with   the   Legends  of  the  Saints,   the 

long-lived   son   of   Zebedee   dwelling   in   Asia  seems  by  the 

testimony  of  Papias  to   be    replaced   by   another  John  who 

lived  far  on  into  the  time  of   Papias  and  was  accessible  to 

him,  so  that  he  may  in  truth  have  dwelt  in  Asia  ;  and  this 

John  we  may  perhaps  designate — even  though  the  title  was- 

by  no  means  regarded  by  Papias  as  peculiar  to  him  alone — 

as  the  Presbyter,  in  order  to  distinguish  him  from  the  Apostle. 

This  assumption  appears  to  be  confirmed  by  the  testimony 

of  Polycrates,1  who  in  enumerating  the  Pillars  of  the  Church 

in   Asia  gives  the  first  place   to   Philip,  one  of  the  Twelve 

Apostles  (though  he  is  here  labouring  under  a  delusion,  for 

it  was  the  deacon  of  Acts  vi.  5  and  viii.  5  fol.),  and  to  his 

prophesying  daughters,  and  only  the  second   to   John,  who 

leaned   on   the   breast  of  the  Lord,  and  who  lay  buried   at 

Ephesus,  while  the  third  he  assigns  to  Polycarp  of  Smyrna. 

The  order  is  remarkable ;  and  why  does  not  John  receive  the 

title  of  Apostle  if  he  belonged  to  the  ranks  of  the  Apostles  ? 

These    and  the   like   considerations  have    given  rise  to  the 

hypothesis  (urged  with  particular  energy  by  Bousset,  Delff 

and  Harnack)  according  to  which  the  John  of  Asia  Minor — 

and  of  the  Johannine  writings — was  only  converted  into  the 

son  of  Zebedee  by  an  early  confusion  of  ideas,  and  was  in 

reality  another  John,  who  had  indeed  seen  Jesus,  but  who  did 

not  belong  to  the  circle  of  the  Twelve — in  short,  the  Presbyter. 

The   testimony  of  Justin  is,  however,  very  unfavourable   to 

this  hypothesis,    for   he   regarded  the  John  of  Patmos   and 

Ephesus  as  the  son  of   Zebedee,  and  yet  must  surely  have 

acquired  this  opinion  in  Asia,  where  he  was  converted.     Nor 

does  the  appeal  to  Polycrates  hold  good,  for  in  the  emotional 

1  Euaeb.  I  fist.  Kcclts.  V.  xxiv.  X 


$31.]  Till-:    .IOIIANMM-:    (»UKSTI()N 

style  of  that  Prince  of  the  Church  the  titles  bestowed  on  the 
Ephesian  John  must  have  been  meant  to  exalt  him  in 
comparison  with  that  of  6  rwv  Saj&stca  aTrocrroKwv  assigned  to 
Philip  of  Hierapolis,  to  whom  the  first  place  in  Polycrates's 
list  was  perhaps  given  merely  on  the  ground  that  he  had 
been  the  first  to  die.  We  surely  cannot  believe  that  Polycndc.- 
considered  it  possible  for  a  man  to  have  leaned  upon  tluv 
breast  of  the  Lord  without  having  been  one  of  the  Apostles  ? 
And  if  there  is  here  a  question  of  an  early  confusion  of 
persons,  might  not  Papias  himself  have  shared  it?  Might 
he  not  on  occasion  have  cited  sayings  of  *  John  '  side  by  side 
with  those  of  Thomas  without  observing  that  that  same  John 
was  still  alive,  and  was  in  fact  the  *  Elder  '  who  was  labouring 
at  Ephesus,  in  his  own  neighbourhood  ?  If  the  Ephesian 
John  never  applied  the  title  of  Apostle  to  himself,  but  always 
that  of  Disciple  only,  if  as  time  went  by  he  was  more  and 
more  generally  hailed  with  pious  affection  as  *  the  Elder,' 
since  of  all  the  generation  of  the  first  eye-witnesses  he  had 
survived  almost  alone,  then  the  error  into  which  the  Bishop 
of  Hierapolis  fell  would  not  be  wholly  unintelligible. 

We  have  no  idea  of  giving  a  verdict.  All  that  is  certain 
is  that  the  tradition  concerning  the  two  Johns  of  Asia  is 
worthless — since  their  fusion  into  a  single  person  could  not 
have  been  accomplished  there  in  so  short  a  time — and  that  a 
Disciple  named  John,  whom  some  call  the  son  of  Zebedee 
and  others  the  '  Presbyter,'  laboured  on  in  Asia  up  to  a  very- 
great  age,  having  probably  left  his  Palestinian  home  for  ever 
in  consequence  of  the  troubles  caused  by  the  Jewish  War. 
But  that  this  disciple  wrote  the  Fourth  Gospel,  Irenseus, 
at  the  end  of  the  second  century,  is  the  first  to  attest.  Such 
a  tradition  can  hardly  be  called  first-rate ;  the  writer's  own 
testimony  to  himself  will  be  found  to  be  far  more  valuable. 

2.  What,  then,  is  the  evidence  of  the  Gospel  and  the  three 
Epistles — for  we  must  take  these  also  into  account  because 
of  their  intimate  connection  with  the  Gospel— as  to  their 
author's  identity  ?  The  superscriptions  are  the  work  of  their 
collectors,  and  therefore  the  self -testimony  of  the  writer  is 
reduced  to  certain  vague  and  doubtful  indications.  In  the 
two  short  epistles  of  the  *  Elder '  (2.  and  3.  John)  we  can 


410         A.N    INTRODUCTION    T<>    THE    NKW    TKSTAMKNT     'THAI-,  i. 

indeed  scarcely  expect  any  enlightenment  on  the  writer's 
past,  but  the  silence  he  maintains  as  to  his  real  name  in  the 
addresses  is  nevertheless  remarkable.  On  the  other  hand,  in 
the  First  Epistle  ]  and  the  Gospel  (e.g.  i.  14,  <  and  we  beheld 
his  glory ')  the  rank  of  eye-witness  is  certainly  claimed  for 
the  writer  with  regard  to  the  Gospel  story,  xxi.  24  of  the 
Gospel  clearly  shows  how  much  importance  the  writer  at- 
tached to  this  ocular  testimony,  and  by  the  mysterious  word 
oiSa/juev  (we  know)  the  Evangelist  is  supplied  with  authorita- 
tive testimony  to  the  truth  of  his  witness,  for  of  course  this 
could  only  have  been  said  by  those  who  had  themselves  been 
eye-witnesses,  by  the  circle  of  the  Condiscipuli,  of  whom  later 
legend  tells.  But  what,  then,  was  the  name  of  this  man 
of  trust  to  whom  they  gave  the  task  of  recording  truth  so 
momentous  ?  It  was,  according  to  this  verse,  merely  '  the 
disciple,'  and  from  the  context  (ovros  EO-TIV)  we  may  read, 
with  verse  20,  '  the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved.'  The  same 
circumlocution  is  met  with  elsewhere,2  and  we  may  take  it  for 
granted  that  the  same  man  was  meant  in  xviii.  15  fol.  by 
*  another  disciple  '  or  '  the  other  disciple,  which  was  known 
unto  the  high  priest.'  This  item,  by  the  way,  is  of  no  use 
to  us,  since  we  learn  nothing  further  concerning  an  acquaint- 
ance of  the  high  priest  among  the  band  of  disciples. 

In  former  times  it  was  believed  as  a  matter  of  course — on 
the  ground  of  tradition — that  the  Beloved  Disciple  was  no 
other  than  John  the  son  of  Zebedee.  Chapter  xxi.  seems  to 
support  this  view,  since  in  verse  2  those  who  took  part  in  the 
miraculous  draught  of  fishes  are  named  as  Simon  Peter, 
Thomas,  Nathaniel,  the  sons  of  Zebedee  and  '  two  others  of  his 
disciples '  ;  and  since  nothing  is  said  as  to  a  subsequent 
change  of  scene,  it  is  among  these  that  we  must  look  for  the 
Beloved  Disciple  whom,  according  to  verse  20,  Peter,  turning 
about,  saw  by  his  side  following  the  Lord.  But  why  should 
he  not  just  as  well  have  been  Nathaniel,  or  one  of  the  un- 
named pair  ?  The  sons  of  Zebedee,  who  are  mentioned 
nowhere  but  here  throughout  the  Gospel,  while  the  names  of 
James  and  John  do  not  appear  at  all,  might  be  mere  padding, 

1  i.  1    I. 

-   xiii.  2  xx.  '_'  llirrf  t<f>iAfi  insto.'ul  of  the  usual  riydira). 


§31.  THK    .lOIlANMNK    ijl'^TlnN  411 


like  the  mention  of  Philip  in  xiv.  8.  If  we  only  knew,  at  any 
rale,  whether  the  Beloved  Disciple  were  one  of  the  Twelve! 
But  this  is  by  no  means  rendered  certain  by  xxi.  2,  for 
Nathaniel  and  the  nameless  pair  cannot  very  well  be  included 
in  the  ranks  of  the  Twelve.  True,  we  are  expressly  told  in 
verse  20  that  this  disciple  was  the  same  as  he  who  had 
leaned  on  Jesus'  breast  at  supper  and  said,  '  Lord,  who  is  he 
that  betrayeth  thee  ?  '  (Cf.  xiii.  23  :  '  There  was  at  the  table 
reclining  in  Jesus'  bosom  one  of  his  disciples,'  and  xiii.  25  : 
'  He  leaning  back,  as  he  was,  on  Jesus'  breast  said  unto  him,' 
etc.)  This  supper  was  the  last  meal  of  which,  according  to 
the  Fourth  Gospel,  Jesus  partook  in  company  with  his 
disciples,  and  it  was  also  that  at  which  he  performed  the 
washing  of  their  feet  and  finally  pointed  out  Judas  as  his 
betrayer.  According  to  the  Synoptics,1  too,  none  but  the 
Twelve  were  with  him  on  this  occasion,  but  the  Synoptic 
account  is  not  conclusive  for  the  Fourth  Gospel  ;  John,  as  we 
know,  says  not  a  word  of  the  '  institution  of  the  Last  Supper  ' 
at  that  parting  ceremony,  which  to  the  Synoptics  is  the  point 
of  greatest  importance,  and  what  they  represent  as  the 
Paschal  meal  is  in  John  merely  an  ordinary  supper.  The 
'  disciples  '  are  indeed  present,  according  to  xiii.  5,  but  it 
seems  scarcely  probable  that  this  idea,  which  occurs  with 
such  extraordinary  frequency  in  John,  should  coincide 
absolutely  with  that  of  the  Twelve,2  when  we  remember  that 
after  the  Eisen  One  had  appeared  to  his  disciples  in  xx.  19 
and  bestowed  the  Holy  Ghost  upon  them,  we  are  told  that 
Thomas,  one  of  the  Twelve,  had  not  been  with  the  disciples 
when  Jesus  came,  whereas  eight  days  later  he  is  to  be  found 
among  them  in  the  same  room.3  In  the  '  High  Priestly  ' 
prayer  of  chap.  xvii.  as  well  as  in  the  parting  discourses,  we 
are  left  with  the  impression  that  '  the  disciples  '  represent,  the 
whole  body  of  believers  —  all  those  whom  God  had  given  to  Jesus 
out  of  the  world  4  and  of  whom  but  one  alone  was  lost  "'  —  a 
statement  which,  by  the  way,  we  hear  with  astonishment  after 
reading  vi.  66.  If,  in  short,  the  Fourth  Gospel  did  not  con- 
tain that  saying  of  Jesus  '  Did  not  I  choose  you  the  twelve  ?  '  (; 

1  Mark  xiv.  17-25  and  parallels.       2  Except  in  vi.  67  and  70  fol.  and  xx.  24. 
»  xx.  26.  4  xvii.  6.  5  xvii.  12.  6  vi.  70. 


>I;CTIO\  TO  TIN;  M-:\V  TKSTA. \IKNT    [CHA:>.  i.. 

we  should  learn  from  it  nothing  whatever  of  a  privileged 
circle  of  twelve  Apostles.  These  few  verses,  then,  vi.  67-71, 
stand  as  a  modest  concession  to  the  traditional  story  ;  but  to 
the  Evangelist  himself  the  title  of  '  disciple  '  seemed  far  more 
glorious  than  that  of  '  one  of  the  twelve,'  which  he  bestows 
only  on  the  traitor  Judas  and  on  the  faithless  Thomas,  while 
the  word  tnrl,o"ro\os  is  used  but  once,  and  that  as  a  parallel  to 
the  word  8o£>Xos.  This,  indeed,  almost  has  the  air  of  a  cer- 
tain animosity  against  the  Twelve  and  their  special  authority, 
and  this  impression  is  further  heightened  by  another  con- 
sideration. 

The  Beloved  Disciple,  who  is  here  professedly  the  narrator, 
find  whom  not  even  the  third  person  of  xix.  35  l  deposes  from 
the  role  of  writer  to  that  of  authority,  regularly  appears  side 
by  side  with  Simon  Peter,  and  as  regularly  eclipses  him.  In 
the  account  of  the  Last  Supper  2  Simon  Peter  wishes  to  know 
whom  Jesus  regards  as  his  betrayer  ;  he  does  not,  however, 
dare  to  ask  the  question  himself,  but  makes  a  sign  to  the 
Beloved  Disciple,  who  immediately  asks  it  and  receives  the 
desired  answer.  At  Jesus'  arrest  but  two  of  his  disciples 
follow  their  Lord,  Peter  and  the  nameless  one ;  the  latter  first 
procures  admittance  for  Peter  into  the  High  Priest's  palace 
by  virtue  of  the  consideration  in  which  he  is  there  held,  but 
then,  while  Peter  cowardly  denies  his  Master,  the  other  ac- 
companies him  faithfully  along  the  whole  of  the  road  to  death, 
he  alone  stands  beneath  the  Cross,  and  he  it  is  who  is  given 
by  the  dying  Christ  to  Mary  as  her  son,  becoming  thereby  in 
the  fullest  sense  the  heir  of  Jesus.  Further  on,:<  again,  he 
and  Peter,  alone  among  the  disciples,  go  to  the  tomb  at  the 
bidding  of  the  Magdalene,  but  he,  the  '  other,'  reaches  it 
before  Peter,  steps  up  to  the  opening  and  sees  the  linen  cloths 
lying  empty.  Upon  this  Peter  enters  the  tomb  itself  before 
him,  but  this  is  no  proof  of  greater  faith  — on  the  contrary,  it 
is  only  of  the  other  that  we  are  definitely  told  '  he  saw  and 
believed,'  even  though  he  too,  as  well  as  Peter,  '  as  yet  knew 
not  the  Scripture.'  Finally  in  xxi.  15-23  it  is  surely  not 

1  '  Ho  that  hath  seen  hath  borne  witness,  and  he  knowetli  th:it  he  F:\ith 
true.' 

*  xiii.  '2:5  etc.  *  xx.  2  etc. 


§31.]  THK    .lOHANNJXi;    (jl'ttSTlnN  413 

intended  to  confer  on  Peter  a  degree  of  love  to  Jesus  to  which 
no  other  had  attained,  but  rather  politely  to  refuse  this  claim 
to  a  TT\SOV  TOUTMV  ;  Peter's  very  question  in  verse  21  betrays 
the  fact  that  he  regarded  the  Beloved  Disciple  as  a  rival, 
and  it  is  also  noteworthy  that  the  latter  follows  Jesus  of  his 
own  accord,  whereas  Peter  does  so  only  by  express  command. 
Lastly,  in  verses  22  and  28  we  are  given  to  understand  that 
a  saying  became  rife  among  the  brethren  that  the  unnamed 
disciple  would  not  die,  for  this  was  thought  to  have  been  fore- 
told him  by  the  Risen  One  as  distinctly  as  had  his  death  upon 
the  cross  to  Peter ;  but  the  writer's  faith  in  this  saying 
had  passed  away,  and  he  impresses  it  upon  us  that  Jesus 
did  not  say  *  he  shall  not  die,'  but  only  '  if  I  will  that  he 
tarry  till  I  come,  what  is  that  to  thee  ? ' 

The  only  touch  in  the  picture  of  the  unknown  disciple 
which  is  in  favour  of  his  identification  with  the  son  of 
Zebedee  is  the  designation  '  he  who  leaned  on  Jesus'  breast,' 
because  this  reminds  us  of  Mark  x.  87,  where  the  sons  of 
Zebedee  ask  to  be  suffered  to  sit,  one  on  the  right  hand  and 
one  on  the  left  of  Jesus  in  his  glory —  a  request  which  would 
certainly  lead  us  to  suppose  that  they  were  accustomed  even 
in  this  world  to  occupy  the  places  of  honour  at  his  side. 
Besides  ice  certainly  have  a  feeling  that  Jesus  could  not 
have  bestowed  special  marks  of  his  love  and  confidence 
on  a  disciple  whom  he  did  not  at  the  same  time  admit  into 
the  circle  of  the  Twelve,  and — which  is  still  more  impor- 
tant—of whom  the  other  Gospels  know  absolutely  nothing. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  however,  this  chosen  one,  who  in  his  turn 
stands  opposed  to  the  other  chosen  ones,  is  a  figure  which 
can  find  no  place  within  the  Synoptic  tradition  :  he  is,  in  fact, 
not  a  figure  of  flesh  and  blood  at  all.  The  self-testimony  of 
the  Fourth  Gospel  is  bound  to  arouse  the  gravest  suspicions 
on  account  of  the  airs  of  mystery  and  the  ambiguity  which 
surround  it.  If  in  xix.  35  and  xx.  31,  the  writer  addresses 
himself  directly  to  his  readers  with  the  words  '  that  ye  may 
believe,'  why  does  he  keep  his  own  personality — that  of 
speaker  or  writer  as  the  case  may  be — so  mysteriously 
veiled?  Considering  the  charges  laid  upon  him  and  the 
events  in  which  he  had  taken  part,  an  '  I '  would  in  truth 


414        AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    XE\V    TESTAMENT    [CHIP. 


! 


have  been  no  less  natural  than  a  'ye  '  or  a  'we.'     If  a  disciple 

were  here  setting  down  some  of  his  recollections  of  Jesus — n< 

matter  from  what  point  of  view  or  after  how  long  an  interval 

— the  tone  of  personal  reminiscence  would  be  bound  to  assert 

itself  more,  and  it  is  wholly  impossible  to  conceive  why  the 

son  of  Zebedee  or  any  other  John  should  so  anxiously  have 

avoided  all  plain  references  to  his  own  personality.     On  the 

other  hand,  the  vagueness  and  mystery  of  the  indications 

concerning   the  author,  his   cautious  reserve   on  one  page, 

followed  by  the  highest  claims  on  another,   would  become 

quite  intelligible  if  a  later  Christian,  writing  in  the  name  of 

the  true  body  of  disciples,  of  those  blessed  ones  who  '  had  not 

seen,  and  yet  had  believed,'  had  composed  a  spiritual,  an 

idealist  Gospel  such  as  must  have  been  written  by  a  disciple 

who,  leaning  as  he  did  upon  his  Master's  breast,  had  been 

enabled  to  gaze  into  his  heart,  and  was  therefore  far  better 

qualified  to  describe  his  greatness  and  glory  than  those  who 

merely  reported  those  things  which   their   bodily  eyes  had 

seen. 

But  it  is  to  be  concluded  from  xxi.  22  fol.  that  the 
unknown  writer  did  not  create  for  himself  the  rule  of  an  ideal 
disciple  quite  independently.  It  is  true  that  he  promises  his 
counterpart  a  spiritual  '  tarrying '  till  the  Parusia  of  the 
Lord — that  is  to  say,  within  the  Gospel,  which  was  to 
win  and  work  till  the  end  of  the  world — but,  on  the  other 
hand,  he  confesses  that  this  personage  was  mortal,  was  in  fact 
dead  ;  and  why  this  change  if  it  were  not  founded  on  some 
historical  fact  ?  The  aged  John  of  Ephesus  is  the  only 
disciple  known  to  us  who  lived  to  such  an  advanced  age  that 
a  belief  in  his  immortality  might  have  arisen  ;  it  is  to  him 
that  tradition  points  ;  Polycrates  claims  the  Beloved  Disciple 
as  a  pillar  of  the  Asiatic  Church,  and  therefore  his  image 
must  surely  have  hovered  before  the  mind  of  our  Evangelist 
too,  whom  it  were  idle  to  look  for  anywhere  but  in  Asia.  But 
was  it  the  son  of  Zebedee  or  the  Presbyter  whom  he  thus 
idealised,  and  in  whose  name  he  sought  to  write  ?  From  the 
investigation  conducted  above  we  must  conclude  that  we  are 
not  in  a  position  to  answer  this  question,  or  at  most  we  can 
but  say  that  he  wished  to  be  heard  and  read,  not  as  the  son 


§31.]  TIII:  .IOIIA.VVIXK  <>n:sTio.\  l  1  .'> 

of  Zebedee  nor  yet  as  the  Presbyter,  but  simply  as  the  disciple 
who  had  understood  Jesus  best  and  loved  him  most  tenderly. 
And  for  a  true  understanding  of  the  Gospel  it  is  a  matter  of 
indifference  which  of  the  two  was  the  John  whom  the  writer 
had  in  his  mind,  at  any  rate  if  we  accept  it  as  certain  that  it 
is  not  this  John  himself  who  speaks  to  us  in  the  Gospel,  but 
one  of  his  later  adherents. 

3.  It  is,  in  fact,  the  one  unassailable  proposition  which 
criticism,  dealing  solely  with  the  internal  evidence,  can  set 
up  concerning  the  Fourth  Gospel,  that  its  author  was  not 
'  the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved.'  Those  who  can  ascribe  it 
to  this  actual  John  may  just  as  well  accept  the  Second  Epistle 
of  Peter  as  the  work  of  Simon  Peter.  Nor  does  the 
Presbyter  hypothesis  affect  this  judgment  in  the  least,  for 
the  Presbyter  himself  would  still  be  a  disciple  who  had 
leaned  on  Jesus'  breast,  who  after  his  Master's  death  had 
taken  that  Master's  mother  into  his  own  house,  and  had  thus 
been  enabled  to  obtain  detailed  information  of  his  early 
history, —  for  a  mere  passing  contact  with  Jesus  such  as  even 
Aristion  could  boast  (supposing  that  he  was  the  fabricator  of 
the  wretched  conclusion  to  Mark)  is  not  sufficient  to  infuse 
historical  reality  into  this  figure  of  the  most  intimate  of 
the  friends  of  Jesus  which  pervades  the  Fourth  Gospel. 
The  most  intimate  must,  after  all,  have  been  a  Hebrew  ; 
though  that  is  not  inconceivable  in  the  case  of  the  Evangelist,, 
since  the  Semitic  extraction  of  the  writer  may  be  observed 
both  in  the  language,  with  its  shrinking  from  the  periodic 
sentence,  and  also  in  the  forms  of  thought.  For  my  part, 
however,  I  should  prefer  to  look  upon  our  Evangelist  as  the 
Christian-born  son  of  Jewish  Christian  parents,  for  his 
attitude  towards  the  Jews  is  so  hostile  and  aloof  that  he  uses 
the  name  no  longer  in  a  national  sense,  but  merely  to  denote 
the  unbelieving  adherents  of  a  superseded  religion.1  It  is, 
true  that,  if  we  substitute  for  the  quondam  fisherman  ar> 
otherwise  unknown  John  who,  as  the  friend  of  Caiaphas,  had 
been  in  a  position  to  acquire  a  high  training  in  theology  and 
philosophy,  and  had  been  an  early  convert  to  the  fundamental 
ideas  of  Paul,  the  objections  winch  (considering  that  in 

1  P.  398. 


416         AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THK    NEW    TRSTAM  KNT       >  IIVP.  j. 


3     ct 

ind 
«h 


Galatians  John  is  named  as  one  of  the  Pillars  of  the  primitive 
community ,  who  reserved  to  themselves  the  Apostleship 
of  the  Circumcision,  and  that  the  son  of  Zebedee  was 
Galilasan  fisherman)  the  writer's  philosophical  culture  ai 
wholly  unprejudiced  attitude  towards  the  Law  and  the  Cii 
cumcision  must  raise  in  our  minds,  lose  in  weight  althougl 
they  do  not  entirely  disappear.  And  there  is  also  the  reflec- 
tion that  the  son  of  Zebedee  himself  would  in  the  thirty  years 
or  more  which  he  is  said  to  have  passed  in  the  Hellenic  atmo- 
sphere of  Ephesus  before  the  composition  of  the  Gospel,  have 
had  time  for  a  thorough  modification  of  his  ideas.  But  the 
difficulty  remains  that  John — whether  Apostle  or  Presbyter- 
must  have  written  the  Gospel  (and  also  the  Epistles,  which 
seem  to  belong  to  a  still  later  date)  in  extreme  old  age,  and 
such  literary  activity  on  the  part  of  a  centenarian  is  open  to 
doubt ;  for  the  monotony  of  the  Gospel  has  other  causes  than 
that  of  senility,  and  the  writer  gives  sufficient  proofs  of  alert 
attention  and  of  a  power  of  work  that  knew  its  own  ends 
and  dominated  its  material. 

The  decisive  argument  is,  however,  furnished  by  literary 
and  historical  criticism,  which  is  obliged  to  protest  altogether 
against  assigning  the  book  to  an  eye-witness.  The  writer  of 
the  Fourth  Gospel  was  acquainted  with  the  three  Synoptics, 
and  his  indebtedness  to  them  is  conspicuous  in  certain  parts  : 
but  is  it  probable  that  the  eye-witness  would  have  made  use 
of  second-hand  authorities  for  his  narrative,  and  that  many 
•  rding  to  Luke)  would  have  vied  with  one  another  in 
writing  Gospels,  while  one  of  the  Pillars,  the  authority  /car' 
*%°Wlv  ^or  these  matters,  was  still  living  at  Ephesus  and 
could  at  any  moment  have  consigned  all  these  productions  to 
oblivion  by  publishing  his  own  recollections  ?  It  is  true  that 
John  does  not  merely  follow  the  Synoptics  in  what  he  tells 
us,  for  by  far  the  greater  part  of  his  Gospel  has  no  Synoptic 
parallels  at  all.  Nor  is  he  ever  a  mere  copyist,  for  it  is  pre- 
cisely the  differences  between  his  account  and  that  of  the  Syn- 
optics which  strike  us  most  forcibly.  The  fact  that  he  passes 
over  many  things  which  they  agree  in  relating,  ought  to  raise 
no  difficulties,  for  he  presupposes  bonus  acquaintance  with  the 
atic'  Gospels.  Again,  that  certain  stories — concerning 


TJIK    JUHANMNK    IJUKSTIO.N  417 

the  miraculous  power  of  Jesus,  for  instance — are  pecu- 
liar to  him  might  at  first  sight  he  taken  to  prove  that  much 
continued  to  exist  in  his  memory  which  had  not  yet  become 
the  common  property  of  wider  circles.  But  the  miracles 
peculiar  to  John  -the  changing  of  the  water  into  wine,  the 
healings  of  the  sick  man  at  the  Pool  of  Bethesda  and  of 
the  man  horn  blind,  and  the  raising  of  Lazarus  —do  not  give 
us  the  impression  of  actual  fact,  but  rather  of  artistic 
intensification  of  well-known  Synoptic  stories.  None  of  the 
disciples  can  have  had  any  motive  in  keeping  secret  these 
brilliant  proofs  of  the  miraculous  power  of  Jesus,  and  we  ask 
ourselves  in  vain  why  none  of  the  Synoptists  appear  to  know 
anything  about  them.  The  simplest  explanation  is  that  they 
arose  in  later  times  under  the  influence  of  a  theology  firmly 
convinced  that  the  Son  of  God  possessed  omnipotence  on  earth 
and  exerted  it  in  all  directions,  and  creating  its  examples 
for  this  almighty  power,  now  in  close  agreement  with  the 
t  radition  and  now  with  but  slight  reference  to  it.  Jesus  had 
in  fact,  according  to  xxi.  25,  done  so  many  deeds  that  '  even 
the  world  itself  would  not  contain  the  books  which  should  be 
written '  concerning  them  ;  therefore,  no  matter  where  the 
imagination  might  range  in  order  to  behold  him,  the  creator 
of  the  world,  at  his  work  of  transformation,  it  could  never 
light  upon  an  empty  spot,  nor  could  it  ever  ascribe  to  him 
deeds  too  vast  or  too  extraordinary.  In  describing  the  appear- 
ances of  the  Eisen  Christ,  for  instance,  the  Fourth  Evan- 
gelist lays  special  stress  on  the  fact  that  he  came  when  the 
doors  were  closed  l ;  the  element  of  the  miraculous  is  thereby 
greatly  increased  in  comparison  with  the  earlier  version  of 
Luke  ;  and  the  story  of  the  Passion,  too,  when  contrasted  with 
that  of  the  Synoptics,  bears  throughout  this  amplifying 
character,  which  tends  to  obliterate  every  trace  of  weakness 
or  of  inward  struggle,  and  which  in  all  other  cases  of  a  com- 
parison of  authorities  counts  as  a  sign  of  later  origin. 

The  foreknowledge  of  Jesus  cannot  be  insisted  upon  too 
emphatically  in  John  -  ;  no  scene  in  Gethsemane  is  here  to  be 
found  ;  Jesus  goes  to  meet  his  captors  of  his  own  accord,  and, 
on  condition  that  they  let  his  disciples  go,  delivers  himself  up 

1  xx.  19,  26.  -  xviii.  4,  xix.  28. 

B  E 


418       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

voluntarily  to  those  who  had  already  been  flung  to  the  groun< 
by  his  mere  word.  The  Jesus  of  the  older  Evangelists,  who  ke] 
silence  during  the  interrogation,  is  here  transformed  into  th( 
accuser  and  judge  ' ;  his  dealings  with  Pilate  are  those  of  a  kii 
with  his  subordinate,  and  only  in  xix.  9  does  the  prophecy  ' 
opened  not  his  mouth  '  obtain  a  momentary  recognition.  The 
words  which  John  puts  into  the  mouth  of  Jesus  on  the  Cross 
serve  only  to  waken  faith  and  to  convert  the  Saviour  into  an 
emblem  of  brotherly  love  ;  the  cry  '  My  God,  my  God,  why 
hast  thou  forsaken  me  ?  '  is  far  more  intolerable  to  John  thi 
it  had  been  to  Luke. 

But  the  entire  framework  of  the  public  career  of  Jesus  is 
different  in  John  from  what  we  find  it  in  the  Synoptics.  It  is 
not  merely  that  the  latter  represent  Jesus  as  being  crucified 
on  the  fifteenth  day  of  the  month  Nizan,  after  he  has 
celebrated  the  Passover  with  his  disciples  on  the  previous 
day,  in  accordance  with  the  Law,  while,  in  John,  Jesus 
dies  on  the  fourteenth  day  of  Nizan,  before  the  beginning 
of  the  Jewish  Passover :  it  is  that  the  activity  of  Jesus  is 
transferred  in  quite  overwhelming  proportions  by  John  to 
Judaea  and  Jerusalem  and  is  distributed  over  several  years, 
whereas  in  the  Synoptics  we  are  told  of  but  one  journey  of 
the  Messiah  to  Jerusalem — that  which  led  him  to  the  fatal 
Passover.  A  very  remarkable  difference  also  exists  between 
the  Synoptics  and  John  with  regard  to  an  occurrence  which 
could  never  have  been  displaced  in  the  memory  of  one  who 
had  taken  part  in  it.  The^cleansing  of  the  Temple,  that  act 
of  Messianic  omnipotence,  is  placed  by  Mark,  Matthew  and 
Luke  in  the  last  days  before  the  death  of  Jesus,  and  forms 
the  main  ground  for  the  action  of  the  authorities  against 
him  ;  John,  on  the  other  hand,  relates  it  as  early  as  chapter 
placing  it  in  the  first  Easter  visit  of  Jesus  to  Jerusalem,  ai 
in  his  account  the  Jews  content  themselves  with  asking  hii 
for  a  sign  of  his  authority  to  do  such  things.  That  the  stai 
ment  of  John  is  here  the  less  probable  of  the  two  is  admitted 
by  almost  all  who  allow  any  criticism  whatever  to  be  applied 
to  his  Gospel,  so  obvious  is  the  connection  in  this  case  with 
the  idea  that  pervades  the  whole  of  John, — that  the  Son- 
ship  of  Jesus  was  attested^continuously  from  the  very 

1  xviii.  20,  21,  23. 


LLO  U 

t 


y  first 


§  31.]  THK    .10IIAXNINK    QUESTION  419 

moment  of  his    appearance   in   public  both  by  himself  and 
by   his    disciples  and    followers,    particularly    by  John    the 
Baptist.      According  to   the    Synoptics,  on   the  other  hand, 
the  Twelve  themselves  did  not  realise  whom  they  had  in  their 
midst  until  comparatively  late ;  this  is  evidently  a  fragment 
•of  real  historical  knowledge,  and  John's  is  the  dogmatic  recon- 
struction.    For  if  in  John  vi.  68  etc.,  Peter  in  the  name  of 
the  Twelve  answers  Jesus'  question  *  Would  ye  also  go  away  ? ' 
with  the  words — '  Lord,  to  whom  shall  we  go?  Thou  hast  the 
words  of  eternal  life.     And  we  have  believed  and  know  that 
thou  art  the  Holy  One  of  God,' — this  is  an  obvious  heightening 
of  Mark  viii.  29,  but  it  contains  nothing  new,  since  as  early 
as  i.  49  Nathaniel  makes  the  same  acknowledgment.     In  my 
opinion  the  Synoptics  are  also  right  as  to  the  day  of  Jesus' 
death  and  as  to  the  duration  of  his  ministry.     For  to  recon- 
struct, solely  on  account  of  the  one  prophetic  utterance  *  How 
many  times  '  etc.  of  Matthew  l  and  Luke,2  several  visits  of 
Jesus  to  Jerusalem  out  of  the  Synoptics  themselves,  against 
their  obvious  intention,  is  almost  as  childish  a  pastime  as  that 
•of  determining  the  number  of  years  of  the  ministry  from  the 
parable  of  the  fig-tree  in  Luke.3     But  John  had  a  definite 
interest  in  making  Jesus  appear  in  Jerusalem  several  times  and 
for  various  different  feasts  ;  Jerusalem  was  to  him  the  stage  on 
which  Jesus  was  meant  to  fight  out  his  battle  with  the  Jews,  and 
this  battle  must  be  depicted  in  more  scenes  than  one.    And  is  it 
easier  to  believe  the  account  of  the  Passion  in  John,  according 
to  which  Jesus  dies  on  the  fourteenth  of  the  month  Nizan,  at 
the  very   hour  at  which,  as   the  Law  directs,   the  Paschal 
Lamb  was  being  prepared  for  the  Passsover  (a  combination  of 
events  which  was  more  than  welcome  to  the  theology  of  fulfil- 
ment, since  it  visibly  represented  Jesus  as  the  Lamb  of  God) 
or  the  report  of  the  Synoptics,  in  which  Jesus  is  still  able  to 
celebrate  the  Passover  with  his  disciples,  and  is  slain  on  the  day 
after  the  Feast,  in  gross  violation  of  the  festal  ordinances  ? 

I  know  of  no  point,  in  fact,  in  which  our  knowledge  of  the 
life  of  Jesus  receives  an  incontestable  increase  through  the 
Fourth  Gospel.  But  even  if  we  could  value  its  author  more 
often  as  a  witness  of  the  first  rank,  it  would  still  be  impossible 

1  xxiii.  37.  2  xiii.  34.  3  xiii.  7. 

K  K  2 


420      AX    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

to  assume  any  more  than  that  he  made  use  of  certain  valuable 
authorities,  and  not  that  he  was  an  eye-  and  ear-witness. 
Some  critics  are  inclined  to  attribute  certain  definite  state- 
ments in  John,  especially  those  indications  of  place  which 
have  no  connection  with  the  writer's  general  design  (Tendeuz) 
— such  as  '  Bethany  beyond  Jordan '  as  the  scene  of  John's 
baptising,1  or  afterwards  '  Mnon  near  to  Salim,'  -  or  the  men- 
tion of  Jesus'  walking  in  Solomon's  porch  3 — to  the  studious 
researches  of  the  Evangelist.  And  he  may  certainly  have  had 
some  knowledge  of  Palestine,  for  the  remark  about  the  High 
Priest  *  of  that  year  '  in  xi.  49,  which  corresponds  so  ill  with 
the  established  custom  of  the  Jews,  affords  no  direct  proof  to 
the  contrary,  since  in  Asia  men  would  easily  become  accus- 
tomed to  such  inaccurate  phraseology.  But  the  names  of 
persons  which  are  occasionally  introduced  in  order  to  give 
animation  to  the  narrative  inspire  but  little  confidence,  and 
still  less  the  numerical  statements  of  xxi.  8  or  vi.  1 9  ('  when 
therefore  they  had  rowed  about  five-and-twenty  or  thirty  fur- 
longs '  etc.).  If,  then,  these  data  have  no  higher  value  than, 
say,  the  statement  of  Josephus  that  Balaam  was  led  by  Balak 
to  a  mountain  sixty  furlongs  distant  from  the  camp  of  the 
Israelites,  have  we  any  right  to  ascribe  those  other  details 
as  to  places,  feasts  and  days  to  anything  but  the  author's 
literary  pleasure  in  making  his  representation  more  detailed  ? 

Unfortunately,  the  verdict  that  John,  while  loosely  de- 
pendent on  the  older  authorities,  created  his  own  materials 
freely,  and  derived  them  from  his  faith  rather  than  from 
trustworthy  sources,  is  not  least  true  when  applied  to  the  dis- 
courses of  Jesus  which  fill  the  greater  part  of  his  book. 

Not  only  does  his  Jesus  speak  in  the  language  of  the  Ev 
gelist  and  pray  in  the  way  in  which  the  Evangelist  narra 
but  what  he  says  has  scarcely  two  or  three  sentences 
common  with  the  Sayings  as  given  in  the  Synoptics.  Instead 
of  the  parables  of  the  latter,  we  have  here,  at  most,  colourless 
allegories  and  ambiguous  metaphors  ;  instead  of  the  pithy 
practical  wisdom  of  the  Synoptics,  we  find  theological  specu- 
lation ;  instead  of  the  constant  relation  to  actual  circum- 
stances and  events,  the  prevailing  character  of  timel 

1  i.  ;  Hi.  2:;.  M, 


§31.]  THI-:  .IOIIANMM:  QUESTION  421 

ness.  All  the  discourses  whose  sole  theme  is  in  reality 
the  speaker  himself  must  be  considered  just  as  unhistorical 
as  the  long  '  Hi^h-Priostly '  prayer  of  chapter  xvii.,  which 
could  scarcely  have  been  uttered  in  the  presence  of  the  disci- 
ples and  formally  recorded  by  them  immediately  afterwards. 
If  we  leave  a  few  doubtful  sayings  out  of  account,  the  only 
verse  in  the  Synoptics  which  recalls  the  tone  of  the  Johannine 
discourses  is  Matt.  xi.  27  (repeated  in  Luke  x.  22)  ;  and  we 
are  thus  confronted  with  the  choice  of  looking  for  our 
historically  attested  materials  either  in  John  or  in  the 
Synoptics — but  not  in  both.  For  a  Jesus  who  preached  alter- 
nately in  the  manner  of  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  and  of 
John  xiv.-xvi.  is  a  psychological  impossibility  ;  the  distinc- 
tion between  his  so-called  exoteric  and  esoteric  teaching  a 
palpable  absurdity.  The  defenders  of  the  '  authenticity '  of 
John  do,  moreover,  as  a  rule  admit  that  the  Evangelist 
intended  to  make  some  sort  of  idealisation  of  the  sayings  of 
Jesus — that  he  was  in  a  state  of  quasi  ecstasy  while  writing 
— in  other  words,  that  he  gives  us  a  picture  of  his  hero 
which  exceeds  the  bounds  of  history.  Science,  however,  can- 
not allow  itself  any  such  mysticism  or  phrase-making  ;  in  the 
Johannine  discourses  it  is  impossible  to  separate  the  form 
from  the  matter— to  ascribe  the  form  to  the  later  writer 
and  the  matter  to  Jesus — no  :  sint  ut  sunt  aut  non  sint  f  It 
is  of  course  perfectly  conceivable  that  as  in  John  xii.  25  u 
saying  of  Jesus  is  corroborated  by  Synoptic  parallels,  so 
there  may  be  certain  others  not  so  corroborated  which  spring 
from  a  different  but  trustworthy  tradition  (e.g.  xiv.  2)  ;  in 
itself,  for  instance,  Jesus  might  well  have  bequeathed  such 
a  consolation  as  that  of  xvi.  21  fol.  to  his  disciples.  But  the 
specifically  Johannine  material,  of  which  chapter  xvii.  is  the 
type,  was  produced  and  created  by  a  single  brain,  and  that 
the  brain  of  the  Evangelist.  The  party  of  Apology,  more- 
over, who  do  their  best  to  disguise  this  fact  by  all  manner 
of  explanatory  hypotheses,  defeat  their  own  ends,  for  in 
reality  they  lower  Jesus  in  order  to  exalt  one  of  his  disciples 
to  the  skies.  Jesus  must  surely  be  regarded,  to  judge  from 
the  effects  which  he  has  left  upon  the  world's  history,  and 
quite  apart  from  the  religious  aspect  of  the  case,  as  a 


422       AX    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

personality  which  either  repelled  or  else  completely  subjugated 
others  ;  but  if  Jesus'  favourite  disciple,  after  he  had  been 
withdrawn  for  many  years  from  all  personal  intercourse  with 
his  master,  could  record  a  '  higher  than  the  merely  historical ' 
impression  of  him :  if  the  Christ  who  is  elevated  to  the  level 
of  the  Johannine  individuality  is  more  lovable,  greater  and 
mightier  than  the  '  strictly  historical '  Christ  of  the  Synoptics  : 
then  Jesus  has  hitherto  been  consistently  over-rated — then 
the  disciple  is  above  his  Lord. 

4.  If  these  considerations  compel  us  to  deny  the  Fourth 
Gospel  all  independent  value  as  an  authority  for  the  history 
of  Jesus,  the  book  acquires  an  even  greater  interest  as  an 
authority  for  that  of  the  early  Church — in  fact,  of  the  Church 
in  general,  for  it  is  certainly  the  original  source  of  that  concep- 
tion of  the  Saviour  to  which,  in  the  theology  of  the  Church  (not 
in  the  feelings  of  the  people),  the  future  was  destined.     More- 
over it  teaches  us  once  for  all  how  very  far  from  any  real  clear- 
ness and  fixity  were  the  ideas  of  the  early  Church  concerning 
Jesus,  since  it  was  possible  in  the  second  century  for  John  to  be- 
come a  Canonical  Gospel  side  by  side  with  the  three  Synoptics. 
The  high-handed  manner  in  which  the  unknown  author  of 
John  composes  discourses  and  prayers  to  put  into  the  mouth  of 
Jesus  and  arranges  the  course  of  his  activity  on  earth,  might 
almost   destroy  our  confidence   in   all   tradition   concerning 
Christ,  if  we  did  not  still  feel  the  contrast  very  markedly 
between  John  and  the  ephemeral  glitter  of  the  multitude  of 
fancy-Gospels  (Phantasieevangelieti)  which  sprang  into  exis- 
tence soon  afterwards,  and  if  we  did  not  see  that  even  John 
respects  the  fundamental  lines  of  actual  history,  although, 
unfortunately,  the  sayings  he  records  are  far  from  suited  to 
it.     The  story  of  the  baptism  of  Jesus,  for  instance,  which 
must  have  been  particularly  inconvenient  to  our  Evangelist,  he 
adapts  indeed  to  his  own  ends,  but  without  destroying  all  traces 
of  the  Synoptic  narrative.     He  was  certainly  aware  of  the 
striking  contrast  between  his  own  presentment  of  the  Gospel 
story  and  that  of  the  other  Evangelists,  with  whose  work,  as  we 
know,  he  was  acquainted  :  he  did  not  feel  satisfied  with  the 
existing  Gospels,  and  intended  partly  to  improve  upon  and 
partly  to  supersede  them.     Here  the  question  confronts 


fcs  us  : 


§31.j  Till:    .HHIANNINK    Ql'KSTlON  428 

whence  this  writer,  who  could  not  feel  called  upon  on  the 
ground  of  eye-witness-ship  to  charge  the  older  Evangelists  with 
falsification— whenoe  he  derived  the  courage  for  this  bold 

task,  and  what  it  was  that  actually  constrained  him  to  take 
up  his  pen.  In  attempting  to  answer  it  we  enter  upon  one  of 
the  most  obscure  passages  in  the  history  of  the  early  Church. 
The  view  that  '  John '  was  published  as  a  philosophical 
prose-poem,  by  an  Asiatic  theologian  who  might  just  as  well 
have  kept  his  Messiad  to  himself,  should  certainly  be  rejected 
as  antiquated  and  narrow-minded.  On  the  contrary,  John  is  a 
work  begotten  by  the  actual  needs  of  the  time.  The  passionate 
zeal  of  the  writer  is  not  entirely  concealed  beneath  the  mono- 
tony of  his  discourses,  and  the  idea  which  is  so  natural  to  us  of 
the  devout  John  wholly  absorbed  in  the  contemplation  of  his 
Saviour  is  in  reality  most  ill-suited  to  such  a  man.  Balden- 
sperger  tries  to  explain  the  Gospel  as  the  manifesto  of  a 
Christian,  writing  during  the  acute  stage  of  the  struggle 
between  the  followers  of  Jesus  and  the  Baptist  sect,  which 
latter  had  openly  gone  back  into  the  camp  of  unbelieving 
Judaism.  The  remarkable  interest  in  John  the  Baptist 
shown  by  our  author,  his  almost  importunate  eagerness  to 
compare  him  with  Jesus  and  to  emphasise  his  inferiority 
(e.g.  x.  41 :  '  John  indeed  did  no  sign '),  would  certainly  be 
explained  by  this  hypothesis,  and  a  flood  of  light  is  thereby 
shed  on  many  a  dark  word  in  the  Gospel.  But  in  spite  of 
Acts  xviii.  24-xix.  7,  the  Baptist  sect  remains  but  a  shadow, 
which  it  is  difficult  to  imagine  as  entering  upon  so  severe 
a  contest  as  Baldensperger  must  assume,  with  what  was  by 
that  time  the  comparatively  old-established  Church.  And 
even  if  we  could  so  think  of  it,  we  should  still  require  another 
factor  for  the  full  comprehension  of  the  peculiarities  of  John, 
for  we  can  hardly  suppose  that  the  farewell  discourses  are 
directed  against  the  Baptist  and  against  those  who  over-rated 
him.  Moreover,  the  Gospel  contains  not  a  single  utterance 
hostile  to  or  even  slighting  tne  Baptist ;  in  v.  33  fol.,  for 
instance,  contempt  is  poured  by  Jesus,  not  upon  the  Baptist, 
who  had  '  borne  witness  unto  the  truth,'  but  upon  the  Jews, 
who  had  sought  testimony  from  a  man,  whereas  Jesus 
neither  asked  nor  needed  any  external  witness,  his  works 


424       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NKW    TKSTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

alone  testifying  to  him  as  Saviour.     Here,  as  in  many  other 
passages — even  in  such  as  contain  no  reference  to  the  Baptist 
at  all — it  is  clearly  shown  that  the  foes  against  whom  the 
controversial  element  in  John  was   directed  were   the   un- 
believing Jews.     These  had  pressed  the  claims  of  the  Baptist 
in  order  to  destroy  the  authority  of  Jesus  ;  they  had  contended 
that  John  had  baptised   unto   the  forgiveness  of  sins  long 
before  Jesus,  that  Jesus  himself  had  received  John's  baptism 
and  consequently  the  forgiveness  of  sins,  and  that  he  had 
thereby  entered  the  ranks  of  John's  disciples.     And  assuredly 
the   disciple  was    not  above   his   master.      As   against  the 
exalted  claims  which  the  Christians  attached  to  the  baptism 
of  their  Church,  the  baptism  of  John  must  still  retain  the 
virtue  of  priority,  and  in  Jewish  thought  the  earlier  is  of 
necessity  the  greater.     Had  not  Jesus  himself  been  obliged 
to  confess  of  the  Baptist   that  he   was   the  greatest  of  all 
men   born   of   women?      Nor   did    such   opponents   confine 
themselves  to  these  few  objections  to  the  pretensions  of  the 
Christians  ;  they  ransacked  the  whole  history  of  Jesus  in  order 
to  discredit  him.     True,  he  had  driven  out  unclean  spirits, 
but  he  had  himself  admitted  that  the  sons  of  the  Pharisees 
could  do  the  like  ;  he  had  chosen  out  a  band  of  disciples,  but 
had  looked  upon  the  traitor  as  his  friend  until  the  very  last 
day,  and  when  misfortune  overtook  him,  even  the  others  h 
forsaken  or  denied  him  to  a  man.     He  had  not  dared  to 
up  to  Jerusalem,  the  true  home  of  the  Messiah,  because  h 
knew  that  he  would  not  be  able  to  subdue  the  wise  of  the 
great  city,  as  he  had  the  foolish  mobs  of  Galilee,  by  a  few 
high-sounding  speeches  ;  and  when  at  last  he  had  made  the 
venture  he  had  soon  been  rudely  awakened  out  of  his  giddy 
dream  of  kingship,  and  had  died  in  despair  upon  the  Cross. 
Such  were  the  reproaches  hurled  by  their  adversaries  against 
the  faithful  in   the  disputes   between  Jews   and   Christians. 
G  entiles  whom    the  latter  were  seeking  to  win  over  would 
suffer   themselves   to   be  imposed  upon    in    this   matter   by 
Judaistic  agitators,  and  even  the  believers  themselves  for  the 
most  part  knew  no  clear  and  decisive  arguments  with  which  to 
refute  such  accusations.     The  enemy  appealed  to  the  Christian 
authorities  themselves:    *  Your  own  Mark,  Matthew  or  Pet 


$31.]  TIIK    .IOIIAXNINE    QUKST1ON 

say  so-and-so,'  they  would  cry ;  and  the  attacked  could  not  deny 
that  such  words  were  indeed  to  be  found  in  their  Gospels. 

It  was  from  such  a  dangerous  situation  that  the  Fourth 
Gospel  took  its  birth.  Its  author  did  not  indeed  reject  the 
existing  Gospels,  nor,  we  may  be  sure,  did  lie  declare  them 
spurious,  for  in  common  with  every  Christian  of  his  time  he 
read  in  them  traditions  handed  down  from  the  circle  of  the 
Twelve,  springing  from  Peter  or  from  Matthew ;  but  even 
though  they  contained  nothing  false,  they  did  not  contain 
enough  :  they  did  not  depict  the  whole  Christ,  the  Christ  from 
whose  majesty  the  darts  of  Jewish  calumny  must  glance 
harmlessly  aside.  The  Church  needed  a  Gospel  that  should 
preach  the  true  Christ  in  his  teaching  and  his  suffering, 
in  his  miraculous  power  and  his  rising  from  the  dead  :  a 
Christ,  in  fact,  with  whom  the  Baptist,  mere  mortal  as  he  was, 
could  not  even  be  compared,  who  had  manifested  himself  from 
beginning  to  end  as  a  divine  being,  furnished  with  divine 
powers  of  action  and  of  knowledge,  who  had  brought  salvation 
to  his  people  and  assured  it  them  for  all  future  ages,  and 
who  had  only  died  that  the  Scripture  might  be  fulfilled  and 
the  full  assurance  of  salvation— founded  upon  water  and 
blood— might  be  given.  He  had  not  stooped  to  win  the 
favour  of  the  multitude,  but  the  aristocrats  of  mind  and  birth 
— so  far  at  least  as  the  might  of  Satan  did  not  hold  them 
captive — crowded  to  hear  him,  and  whenever  an  injury  was 
inflicted  on  him  it  was  of  his  own  free  will. 

These  few  examples  must  suffice  to  illustrate  the  position 
taken  up  by  the  Fourth  Gospel.  It  is  throughout  Apologetic. 
The  Gospel  history  is  arranged  and  adapted  in  the  most  un- 
compromising manner  with  a  view  to  repelling  Jewish  insinua- 
tions against  the  Gospel  as  it  had  hitherto  existed.  Nor  if 
we  wish  to  estimate  both  historically  and  psychologically  the 
causes  which  led  to  the  production  of  John,  can  we  afford 
to  overlook  the  depreciatory  glance  it  casts  upon  the  Synoptics, 
and  upon  those  Christians  who  thought  to  rely  on  the 
Synoptics  alone — the  expanded  traditions  of  the  Twelve — in 
the  battle  of  the  religions.  Thus  the  Fourth  Evangelist 
cannot  have  taken  up  his  pen  before  the  second  century. 
There  is  no  need  to  assume  that  an  alarming  increase  took 


42f>       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NHW    TESTAMP^NT      [CHAP.  I. 

place  in  the  Jewish  propaganda  during  his  time  ;  the  only 
necessary  supposition  is  that  the  two  monotheistic  religions, 
each  with  its  vigorous  proselytising  tendency,  had  become 
definitely  separated,  and  were  now  openly  striving — precisely 
in  the  interest  of  their  missionary  activities — to  dispute  one 
another's  claims  to  precedence.  This  state  of  things,  however, 
continued  during  the  whole  of  the  second  century.  As  Justin 
championed  the  cause  of  the  Church  against  Judaism  in 
his  Dialogue  with  Tryphon  the  Jew,  so  the  Fourth  Evangelist 
wished  to  champion  it  in  his  Gospel — only  with  still  greater 
effect,  because  his  demonstration  was  positive,  was  in  the 
grand  style,  and  was  apparently  carried  out  with  all  the  im- 
partiality of  the  historian. 

But  with  whose  authority  should  he  endow  his  Gospel  ? 
His  own  name,  that  of  a  little-known  and  perhaps  compara- 
tively young  Christian  theologian,  would  have  done  more  harm 
than  good,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  he  would  scarcely  have 
dared  to  issue  it  expressly  under  that  of  another.     His  source 
of  information  must  be  an  eye-witness,  and  if  possible  one  who 
by  his  relation  to  Jesus  possessed  the  highest  qualifications  foi 
telling  the  story  of  Jesus.    Well,  he  thought  he  was  acquainted 
with  such  a  man.     The  man  to  whom  he,  as  well  as  the  whole 
Asiatic  Church  of  his  time,  owed  their  knowledge  of  the  Lamb 
of  God,  of  his  divine  character  and  of  the  absolute  nature  of 
the  redemption  he  had  brought,  was  the  disciple  John.     John 
had  passed  away,  even  though  men  had  believed  he  would 
live  to  see  the  return  of  the  Lord,  but  his  witness — his  Gospel 
—lived  on  in  his  communities,  and  assuredly  it  would  be  an 
act  of  which  he  would  have  approved  to  draw  up  this  witness 
of  his  in  written  form,  now,  when  the  need  for  a  convincing 
word  of  testimony  was  so  urgently  felt.     But  the  writer  would 
have  been  no  true  child  of  his  age  if  in  carrying  out  his  plan 
his  attention  had  always  been  anxiously  fixed  in  the  first 
instance  upon  the  tradition  as  delivered  by  John,  instead  of 
upon  the  needs  of  the  Church.     The  greater  part  of  the  dis- 
courses of  Jesus,  and  probably  the  bold  modifications  of  the 
Passion  story  in  an  equal  degree,  are  his  own  work.     How  far 
there  may  already  have  existed  in.  much  of  this  a  school  tr< 
tion  on  which  he  worked,  we  cannot  even  attempt  to  ascert 


§31.]  THE  JOHANNIM;  QUESTION  -127 

but  what  must  have  given  him  an  inward  confidence  in  hi.- 
task  was  the  conviction  that  he  was  reproducing  the  portrait 
of  Christ  exactly  as  he  had  received  it  from  John.  According 
to  the  standards  of  his  time,  the  words*  we  know  that  lii,- 
witness  is  true  '  (xxi.  24)  would  afford  full  excuse  for  the  man 
who,  in  order  to  increase  the  effect  of  this  witness,  had  shortly 
before  added  to  the  words  *  this  is  the  disciple  which  beareth 
witness  of  these  things,'  which  are  subjectively  true,  the 
objectively  questionable  exaggeration  '  and  which  wrote  these 
things.' 

The  connection  between  the  Gospel  and  the  long-lived 
disciple  of  Jesus  in  Asia,  of  whom  we  have  certain  knowledge 
through  Polycarp  and  Irenaeus,  is  thus  established,  and  where  . 
else  should  we  look  for  this  enthusiastic  admirer  of  the  disciple 
who  leaned  on  the  breast  of  the  Lord  than  at  Ephesus,  the 
city  where  that  disciple  had  stood  for  so  many  years  like  a 
steadfast  pillar  among  his  brethren  ?  And  in  Asia  Minor  we 
may  discover  yet  other  elements  of  the  Christology  and  the 
religious  language  of  which  the  perfect  type  is  offered  by 
the  Fourth  Gospel ;  e.g.  in  the  Apocalypse  (see  p.  281),  in 
the  quotations  from  the  Asiatic  Presbyters  made  by  Irenaeus, 
in  the  writings  of  Papias  (e.g.  the  passage  quoted  by  Eusebius 
in  the  Hist.  Eccles.  III.  xxxix.  3  :  svro\as  .  .  .  air  avrrjs 
TrapajivoiJLsvas  rrfs  a\t]6sLas}  and  of  Polycarp.1  The  divine 
Christ,  Christ  as  the  Truth,  the  Way,  the  Life,  the  bread  of 
Life,  etc.,  are  not  the  creations  of  our  Evangelist  himself,  but 
were  found  pre-existing  by  him  as  the  creations  of  Johannine 
thought,  and  he  himself  merely  erected  his  own  artistic 
edifice  upon  the  Johannine  foundation. 

Unfortunately,  this  John  must,  notwithstanding,  always 
remain  for  us  a  figure  wrapped  in  mystery.  He  must  at  any 
rate  have  been  a  determined  and  successful  representative 
of  '  spiritual '  (pneumatische)  Christology,  a  believer,  for 
whom  to  have  Christ  and  all  the  treasures  of  time  and 
eternity,  on  the  one  hand,  and,  on  the  other,  to  have 
love  both  to  God  and  to  the  brethren,  were  identical  con- 
ceptions, and  moreover  so  strongly  marked  a  personality, 
that  although  he  but  travelled  further  along  the  road 

1  E.g.,  Philip,  iii.  3,  vii.  1,  ix.  2. 


428       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    TITK    NEW    TE-STAMKNT      [CHAP.  i. 

laid  down  by  Paul,  the  image  of  Paul  was  blotted  out  by  him 
—though  all  unintentionally — in  the  Asiatic  provinces.     The 
Epistles  of  Paul  were  still  preserved  there,  but  all  recollection 
of  the  man  himself  faded  away.     Was  this  great  man,  then, 
one  of  the  *  Sons  of  thunder,'  or  a  disciple  John  who  did  not 
come  into  prominence  until  comparatively  late  ?     The  title  of 
TTpscrpvrspos  borne  by  2.  and  3.  John  merely  establishes  the 
identity  of  the  John  referred  to  there  with  him  of  xxi.  22  of 
the  Gospel ;  it  is  the  disciple  who  dieth  not,  the  Elder  among 
Elders.     It  is  true  that  the  Apocalypse  is  particularly  refrac- 
tory to  the  notion  of  Apostolic  authorship,  but  neither  would 
the  Beloved  Disciple  of  the  Fourth  Gospel  have  been  a  suitable 
author  for  it,  since  on  that  hypothesis  we  should  have  ex- 
pected some  reference  to  the  past  imperishable  relations  of  the 
Seer  with  the  Son  of  God.     However  cautious  we  ought  to  be 
in  demanding  a  personal  element  in  an  Apocalypse,  it  certainly 
cannot  be  considered  probable  that  the  Bevelation  was  the 
work  of  John,  the  aged  disciple  of  Asia ;  at  most  it,  too,  can 
be  said  to  belong  to  his  '  School,'  even  though  it  may  be   of 
earlier  date  than  the  Gospel,  and    may  perhaps    be    more 
directly  dependent  on  his  teaching.     When  this  is  said,  how- 
ever, the  last  reason  for  preferring  the  intangible '  Presbyter  ' 
to  the  son  of  Zebedee  disappears  ;  the  latter  might  well  have 
given  a  mighty  impulse  to  the  Christianity  of  Asia  in  the 
years  between   70  and  100,  and  have  impressed  the  stamp 
of  his  personality  upon  the  Church  of  that  district  for  many 
years  to  come. 

Of  course,  what  he  evidently  prided  himself  upon  most 
was,  not  his  having  once  belonged  to  the  circle  of  the 
Twelve,  but  the  fact  that  as  disciple  he  had  been  and  still  was 
bound  to  his  Master  by  special  and  indissoluble  ties  of  love  ; 
thus  it  was  the  character  of  disciple,  eye-witness,  Beloved 
of  the  Lord,  which  his  unknown  follower  who  dared  to  write 
the  Gospel  prized  in  him  more  highly  than  that  of  Apostle - 
especially  since  certain  Apostles  were  not  merely  alleged  by 
Jewish  slanderers,  but  had  proved  themselves  to  be,  guilty  of 
treachery,  cowardice,  lack  of  understanding  and  of  faith. 
His  aged  master,  on  the  other  hand,  was  for  him  the  embodi- 
ment of  the  voice  of  truth.  And  when  he  had  designed  tl 


§31.]  TIIK    .IOIIANMNK    (tl'KSTION 

Gospel   in   a  manner   he    thought    worthy    of    the    '  Elder  * 
himself,  and  when  his  work  earned  the  approval  of  those  who 
had  often  sought  in  vain  for  such  a  weapon  during  the  heat 
of  battle,  it  became  so  sacred  a  task  to  him  and  so  much  his 
second   nature   to   write   in   the   tone   of   John,    that   when 
Gnosticism,    with   its   errors   both   of   theory  and   practice, 
appeared  and  demanded  a  speedy  and  telling  refutation,  he 
entered  the  lists  against  it  in  the  same  character  of  the  aged 
witness — only,  naturally,  not  with  another  Gospel,  but  with  an 
Epistle,  the  form  of  literature  whose  utility  for  such  disputes 
had   been   established   by   Paul.     Isolated    supplements   he 
furnished   in   the  shape  of  the  two  shorter   Epistles.     The 
clearer  emphasis  here  laid  on  the  authority  by  which  these 
writings — appearing,   as   they   probably   did,    suddenly   and 
mysteriously — claimed  attention,  as  well  as  the  complaints  in 
2.  and  3.  of  certain  open  refusals  to  receive  them  which  had 
reached  the  writer's  ears,  confirm  us  in  the  assumption  which 
we  must  in  any  case  have  made,  that  the  Johannine  writings 
were  not  welcomed  with  equal  enthusiasm  by  all  Christians 
who  were  brought  into  contact  with  them.     Various  motives 
may  have  combined  to  produce  the  objections  raised  against 
all  or  some  of  them :  in  the  East,  for  instance,  many  who  had 
found  a  lifelong  sustenance  in  Mark  or  Matthew  would  have 
rejected  John  in  the  spirit  of  Luke  v.  39. l     But  the  new 
generation — and   the   young   everywhere— accepted   it;    the 
self-consciousness  of  the  new  religion  wras  more  simply  and 
sublimely  formulated  there  than  in  the  older  Gospels,  and 
whatever  the  fascination  of  the  subject  left  unaccomplished 
was  performed  by  the  renown  of  the  name  under  which  these 
writings  circulated.     After  the  lapse  of  a  few  decades  the  em- 
barrassment into  which  the  Church  was  brought  by  the  constant 
appeals  of  Gnostics,  Montanists  and  Docetists  to  the  authority 
of  John,  or  the  objections  which  the  Quartodecimani  were 
bound  to  raise  against  the  new  date  for  the  Crucifixion,  hardly 
so  much  as  weighed  in  the  scale  against  the  name  of  John.  He 
was  the  last  survivor  of  the  band  of  Jesus'  personal  friends,  and 
therefore  the  last  word  was  said  by  '  his  '  Gospel. 

1  '  And  no  man  having  drunk  old  wine  desircth  ne\v,  for  he  saith  (i  The  old  is 
better.'" 


430      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 


CHAPTER   II 


§  32.  The  Acts  of  the  Apostles 

[Cf.  H.  A.  W.  Meyer,  vol.  iii.  (ed.  8,  by  H.  H.  Wendt,  18! 
and  Holtzmann's  Hand-Commentar,  vol.  i.  (on  the  Synoptics  and 
Acts,  ed.  2,  1892).  The  most  recent  revision,  by  Franz  Overbeck 
in  1870,  of  W.  M.  L.  de  Wette's  '  Commentar '  is  a  work  of 
enduring  value.  Consult  also  E.  Zeller  :  '  Die  Apostelgeschichte 
nach  ihrem  Inhalt  und  Ursprung  kritisch  untersucht '  (1854), 
which  is  the  most  notable  statement  of  the  Tubingen  point  of 
view ;  E.  Lekebusch :  '  Die  Composition  und  Entstehung  der 
Apostelgeschichte  '  (1854),  moderate  Apologetics;  F.  Spitta  :  'Die 
Apostelgeschichte,  ihre  Quellen  und  deren  geschichtlichen  Wert ' 
(1891)  ;  J.  Weiss :  '  Uber  die  Absicht  und  den  literarischen 
Charakter  der  Apostelgeschichte '  (1897),  and  P.  W.  Schmiedel's 
article  entitled  '  The  Acts  of  the  Apostles '  in  the  '  Encyclo- 
paedia Biblica,'  vol.  i.  pp.  37-57  (1899).  For  other  works  see 
below,  par.  6.] 

1.  After  an  introduction  linking  this  work  with  the  Gospel 
of  Luke,1  the  first  chapter  describes  how  before  his  Ascension 
Jesus  committed  the  continuation  of  his  work  on  earth  to  the 
Eleven,1'  and  how  these  chose  a  certain  Matthias  by  lot  to 
fill  the  twelfth  place  in  their  ranks  in  the  room  of  Judas,  who 
had  died  a  horrible  death. :!  On  the  day  of  Pentecost  the 
promise  made  by  Jesus  '  is  fulfilled ;  the  Holy  Ghost  is 
bestowed  upon  the  disciples,  and  the  miracle  of  their  speaking 
with  tongues  is  explained  by  Peter  before  the  astonished 
multitudes  of  pilgrims  who  come  streaming  to  the  Feast  from 
;ill  parts  of  the  earth  ;  three  thousand  souls  are  won  over  to  the 
Gospel,  and  the  believers  proceed  to  live  together  in  an  ideal 


i.  1-3. 


-  i.  4-14. 


i.  15-20. 


i.  8. 


§32.]  THE    ACTS    OF    TIIK    AI'OSTLES 

Community  of   goods.1     In  chapters  iii.-v.  we  have  further 
proofs  of  the  miraculous  power  of  the  new  Spirit :  a  lame 
man  is  healed ;  Peter  and  John  are  imprisoned   and    then 
set  free ;  Ananias  and  Sapphira  are  punished  for  the  deceit 
they   had  practised   in   delivering    up   their  property,    the 
Apostles  who  had   been  taken  prisoners   by  the   Sadducees 
are  released  by  an  angel ;  and,  after  Peter's  defence  in  the 
Sanhedrin,  Gamaliel  advises  a  cautious  and  temporising  treat- 
ment  of   his   followers.      The  next   two  chapters 2  tell  how 
seven  ministers  to  the  poor  were  chosen  for  the  community 
in  Jerusalem,  and  how  one  of  them,  Stephen,  after  rising  in 
a  brilliant  speech  from  the  position  of  one  accused  of  blas- 
pheming the  Law  to  that  of   an  accuser   of   the   Jews  who 
disgraced  the  Law,  was  stoned  to  death.     But  the  dispersal 
of  the  Christians  which  follows  upon  this  event  brings  nothing 
but  good   to   their  cause,  for  the  Gospel  now  penetrates  to 
Samaria,  and  reaches  a  eunuch  from  distant  Ethiopia,  while 
an  episode  tells  of  the  sorcerer  Simon,  who  wished  to  buy  the 
gift  of  conferring  the  Holy  Ghost  from  the  Apostles.3     Next 
follows  a  description  of  the  conversion  of  the  persecutor  Saul,4 
after  which  we  hear  how  Peter  journeyed  to  and  fro,  now 
as  a  miracle-worker  in  Lydda  and  Joppa,  now  as  a  baptiser 
of  believing  Gentiles  in  the  house  of  the  centurion  Cornelius 
at  Csesarea,  where,  prepared  beforehand  by  visions,  he  is  con- 
vinced by  actual  observation  that  God  did  not  deny  the  Holy 
Ghost  even  to  the  uncircumcised.5     Next  follows  a  description 
of  the  spread  of  Christianity  as  far  as  Antioch,  where  the 
name  of  '  Christian  '  first  appears.'*     Even  the  hatred  of  King 
Herod  Agrippa  cannot  harm  the  primitive  community,  for 
though  James   is   executed,    Peter]  is  miraculously  released 
from  prison.7     Chaps,  xiii.  and  xiv.  tellfof   the    missionary 
journey   of   Barnabas   and    Saul — now   re-named    Paul — by 
way   of   Cyprus   to   Asia  Minor   and!jrnorthwards  as   far  as 
Iconium,    Lystra    and    Derbe ;     then  , follows    an    account 
of    the   Apostolic   Council  rofj  Jerusalem  8^-at    which   it    is 
decided  that  Gentile  converts-should  indeed  be  required,  in 

1  Ch.  ii.  2  vi.  and  vii.  *  Ch.  via. 

4  ix.  1-30.  5  ix.  31-xi.  18.  6  xi.  19-26. 

^xii.  1-2.-,.  «  xv.  1-33. 


432      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    Til!'    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

consideration  of  the  weekly  readings  from  the  books  of  Moses 
in  all  synagogues,  to  abstain  from  things  sacrificed  to  idols, 
from  blood,  from  things  strangled  and  from  fornication,  but 
should  be  absolved  from  all  further  bondage  to  the  Law  (this 
the  so-called  Apostolic  Decree).  Paul  and  Barnabas  now 
separate  for  fresh  missionary  journeys,  the  former  going 
overland  through  Cilicia,  Lystra  and  Iconium  to  Galatia, 
Troas  and  Macedonia.1  The  proceedings  at  Philippi,  where 
Paul  and  his  companions  are  scourged  and  condemned  to 
close  imprisonment,  but  are  delivered  on  the  very  next  day 
by  a  miraculous  interposition  of  Providence,  and  even  escorted 
out  of  the  town  with  all  honour  by  the  magistrates,  are  next 
described  in  detail,2  and  in  chap.  xvii.  we  are  told  how  they 
travelled  on,  westwards  and  southwards,  by  way  of  Thessa- 
lonica,  Beroea  and  Athens  -where  Paul  makes  his  speech  on 
the  Areopagus — to  Corinth.3  Returned  to  Antioch,  Paul 
starts  on  a  fresh  expedition  and  chooses  Asia  as  his  field  of 
operations,  but  after  three  years'  work  there  he  is  expelled 
from  Ephesus,  never  to  return,  by  the  tumult  raised  against 
him  by  the  silversmith  Demetrius.  Then  follows  '  an  account, 
very  minute  in  parts,  of  his  journey  through  Macedonia  down 
to  Greece  and  back,  and  then  along  the  eastern  coast  of  the 
Mediterranean  to  Caesarea,  after  which  we  hear  how  he 
arrived  in  Jerusalem,  then  of  the  rising  stirred  up  against 
him  by  the  Jews,  of  his  transportation  to  Csesarea,  where  he 
is  kept  in  prison  for  two  years  until  Festus  succeeds  to  the 
procuratorship,  and  of  the  various  speeches  he  makes  in  his 
defence.5  The  last  two  chapters  tell  of  his  removal  to  Rome  an< 
of  his  discussions  with  the  heads  of  the  Jewish  community 
there,  and  the  document  ends  with  the  statement  that  he 
suffered  to  preach  the  Gospel  there  for  two  whole  years 
'  none  forbidding  him.' 

We  must  not  expect  to  find  any  subtly  considered  scheme 
in  this  book,  which  merely  narrates  certain  events  in  the  order 
of  their  succession,  but  it  is  nevertheless  possible  to  distinguish 
two  parts,  the  first  consisting  of  chaps,  i.  -xii.,  in  which  Peter 
stands  at  the  centre  of  affairs  and  is,  as  it  were,  the  leader  of 

1  xv.  35-xvi.  11.  1-  40.  »  Chs.  xviii.  and  xix. 

«  xx.  1-xxi.  14.  *  xxi.  15-xxvi 


§  32.]  THE    ACTS   OF   THE    APOSTLKS  433 

the  forward  movement,  and  the  second  of  chapters  xiii.  xxviii., 
in  which  this  role  is  transferred  to  Paul.  In  other  words, 
the  first  contains  the  history  of  tho  primitive  community  and 
of  the  Palestinian  mission ;  the  second,  that  of  the  spread- 
ing of  the  Gospel  among  the  Gentiles  to  the  very  ends  of  the 
earth,  from  Antioch  to  Rome.  But  in  the  central  portion,  be- 
tween chapters  viii.  and  xv.,  these  two  divisions  frequently 
overlap  ;  the  account  of  the  Council  of  Jerusalem,  for  instance, 
in  xv.,  belongs  by  right  to  the  first  part,  and  that  of  the 
conversion  of  Paul,1  together  with  viii.  3  and  xi.  25,  more 
correctly  to  the  second  ;  it  can,  however,  have  been  no  part  of 
the  writer's  purpose  to  impose  this  dualism  upon  his  readers' 
consciousness. 

2.  By  the  dedication  to  Theophilus 2  and  the  express 
reference  to  a  former  work  dealing  with  Jesus,  as  well  as  by 
the  assumption  of  Jerusalem  as  the  place  of  the  Ascension 
(which  agrees  ill  with  the  accounts  in  Mark,  Matthew  and 
John),  the  Book  of  Acts  gives  us  to  understand  that  it  is  a  . 
continuation  of  the  Gospel  of  Luke.  Moreover,  we  have  no 
cause  to  consider  the  indications  of  the  prologue  to  be  a  mere 
fabrication,  for  in  language,  taste,  religious  views  (e.g.  the 
exaltation  of  poverty  and  the  high  value  set  on  fasting)  and 
descriptive  colour  the  two  books  agree  almost  more  closely 
than  we  could  have  any  right  to  expect,  considering  their  very 
different  subjects  and  the  abundant  use  by  both  of  very 
different  materials.  Their  similarity  in  bulk  would  also  seem 
to  have  been  part  of  the  intention  of  the  writer.  J.  H.  Scholten's 
theory  (put  forward  in  1873)  that  though  the  writer  of  Acts, 
like  the  writer  of  Luke,  belonged  to  the  Pauline  school,  yet 
the  two  cannot  have  been  identical,  because  the  former  is 
favourably  inclined  towards  Jewish  Christianity,  while  the 
latter  is  opposed  to  it,  rests  on  an  insufficient  foundation  ;  nor 
are  certain  more  recent  hypotheses,  according  to  which  the 
Acts  passed  through  the  hands  of  a  later  reviser,  who  is  to  be 
clearly  distinguished  from  the  author  (here  the  author  both 
of  Acts  and  Luke),  deserving  of  any  higher  consideration. 
Slight  contradictions  in  terms  are  not  sufficient  to  justify  us 
in  bestowing  three  authors  upon  the  Acts — a  Judaist,  an  anti- 

1  ix.  1-30.  -  See  Luke  i.  3. 

F  F 


: 


434     AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP. 

Judaist  and  a  neutral — for  the  Gospel  can  also  display  simila 
incongruities.  It  is  true  that  the  question  as  to  whether  this 
one  writer  had  intended  from  the  beginning  to  follow  up  his 
Gospel  by  a  second  book  must  remain  unanswered.  The 
prologue  of  Luke  does  not  indicate  it  clearly  and  appears  to 
belong  solely  to  the  Gospel,  while  the  ending  is  complete  in 
itself  and  needs  no  supplement.  And  since  the  picture  of 
the  Ascension  is  certainly  far  more  highly  coloured  in  the  1st 
chapter  of  Acts  than  in  Luke  xxiv.,  the  conclusion  may  be 
permitted  that  the  two  books  were  not  written  at  one  sitting  ; 
and  the  Acts  are  also  made  into  an  independent  work  by  the 
catalogue  of  the  Apostles,  which  is  here  inserted  1  regard- 
less of  its  duplicate  in  Luke.2 

3.  The  Book  of  Acts  was  probably  written  a  few  years  later 
than  Luke,  i.e.  somewhere  between  the  years  100  and  105.  It 
is  true  that  it  contains  no  direct  references  to  events  of  the 
Post-Apostolic  period,  in  consequence  of  which  some  have 
ventured  to  date  the  book  as  early  as  the  lifetime  of  Paul,  of 
whose  death  we  are  not  told.  This  is,  however,  rendered 
impossible  by  the  fact  that  the  latter  is  represented  in  chapter 
xx.3  as  bidding  farewell  for  ever  to  the  elders  of  the  church 
at  Ephesus,  while  the  execution  of  Paul  is  left  unmentioned 
at  the  end  for  other  reasons  than  that  of  its  not  having  taken 
place  at  the  time  those  verses  were  written.4  The  decisive 
argument  is  that  the  book  stands  no  nearer  to  the  events 
related  in  it  than  does  the  Gospel  to  its  own  subject:  in  both 
the  story  is  told  from  written  authorities  ;  the  full  observation 
of  the  eye-witness  makes  itself  felt  partially,  wherever  these 
authorities  permit ;  but  side  by  side  with  it,  and  not  always 
the  earlier  chapters  only,  we  come  upon  the  nebulous  coi 
ceptions  of  a  later  generation.  The  idealisation  here  made 
of  the  Apostolic  Age  is  not  the  work  of  an  enthusiastic, 
uncritical  contemporary ;  it  is  far  too  systematic  for  that, 
and  the  knowledge  which  the  writer  still  possesses  of  that 
age  is  significantly  meagre.  If  the  Acts  were  written  by 
a  friend  of  Paul  during  Paul's  actual  lifetime,  the  writer 
would  incur  the  sharpest  criticism,  for  he  must  in  that 

1  i.  13.  =  vi.  u  16. 

.    1-38,  and  cf.  xxi.  4,  11-14.  •       4  See  pp.  43,  44. 


§  32.]  THE   ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES  435 

case  have  written  the  history  of  his  own  times  not  only 
in  a  partisan  and  arbitrary  spirit,  but  actually  with  the 
grossest  carelessness ;  he  must  have  passed  over  important 
events  in  silence  concerning  which  a  single  question  would 
have  brought  him  information.  In  reality  the  impres- 
sion he  gives  throughout  is  rather  that  of  the  industrious 
collector,  hampered  by  insufficient  material,  but  desiring  to 
tell  his  story  impartially.  And  a  motive  for  the  com- 
position of  such  an  Apostolic  history  in  the  years  63  or  64, 
when  Peter,  Paul  and  John  were  still  alive  and  expected  to 
see  the  return  of  Jesus  with  bodily  eyes,  is  only  discoverable 
by  those  whose  lack  of  judgment  is  as  complete  as  that  of  the 
party  which  desires  to  find  room  for  the  first  sketch  of  a 
Gospel  in  the  very  lifetime  of  Jesus. 

On  the  contrary,  the  plan  of  the  Acts  as  well  as  the  man- 
ner of  its  execution  point,  to  a  time  when  the  first  Christian 
generation  had  already  died  away.  The  writer  knows  only  of 
organised  communities :  as  Jerusalem  has  its  Presbyters,1  so 
in  Pisidia  Paul  and  Barnabas  are  obliged  to  choose  Presbyters 
for  every  community 2 ;  the  Apostles  consecrate  the  ministering 
deacons  chosen  by  the  community  by  a  laying  on  of  hands  3 
— a  sacrament  which  forms  so  important  a  condition  of  the 
reception  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  even  in  the  case  of  baptised 
Christians,4  that  after  his  conversion  Paul  is  compensated 
for  its  absence  by  a  special  mission  entrusted  by  Christ  in  a 
vision  to  the  disciple  Ananias.5  A  similar  equivalent,  though 
under  a  different  form,  is  granted  to  the  centurion  Cornelius.6 
But  it  is  more  especially  in  chapter  xv.  that  the  Apostles 
appear  as  the  true  leaders  of  the  Church,  not  only  empowered 
but  bound  to  provide  it  with  laws.  Unconsciously,  in  fact, 
the  picture  of  the  Apostles  given  in  the  Acts  reminds  us  of 
that  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles.  Under  all  these  circumstances 
it  is  impossible  that  the  author  should  have  been  Luke  the 
companion  of  Paul,  as  the  tradition  would  have  it ;  gaps  in 
his  knowledge  which  meant  nothing  in  the  case  of  the  Gospel 
are  here  irreconcilable  with  the  idea  that  the  book  is  from  the 
hand  of  an  Apostle's  disciple,  even  granted  that  he  might  have 

1  xi.  30.  -  xiv.  23.  »  vi.  6. 

<  viii.  17  fol.  '  ix.  10-18.  •  x.  44-4R. 

F  K  2 


436     AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP,  i 

lived  long  enough  to  write  his  book  at  the  very  end  of  th 
first  century.     But  are  we  to  assume  that  none  but  greybeards 
with  failing  memories  were  proper  authors  for  the  books 
the  New  Testament  ?     On  the  other  hand,  we  cannot  place  tl 
Acts  later  than  the  beginning  of  the  second  century,  becauf 
no  traces  of  Gnostic  seducers  as  yet  appear  within  the  writei 
horizon,  or  at  any  rate  give  him  any  uneasiness,  and  still  less 
is  the   state  of  nervousness  to  be  observed  in  it  into  which 
the   Church   must   have   fallen   in   consequence  of   a   long- 
continued  period  of  persecution.     It  is  true  that  this  is  no 
proof   that   the  writer  beheld   all   the  communities   around 
him  enjoying  undisturbed  tranquillity  ;  on  the  contrary,  they 
needed  encouragement,  and  this  an  account  of  the  Acts  of  the 
Apostles  was  peculiarly  well  fitted  to  give.     Such  a  situatioi 
agrees  admirably  with  the  time  of  unrest  ushered  in  by  tl 
persecution  of  Domitian.     We   will   not  introduce  into 
discussion  on  the  date  of  the  book  the  much-debated  questioi 
as  to  whether  our  author  was  acquainted  with  Josephus, 
especially  as   to  whether  he  had  read  the  latter's  '  Jewisl 
War  '  and  '  Archaeologia '  or   not ;  Acts  v.  36  fol.  certain!; 
bears  a  strong  resemblance  to  XX.  v.  1  fol.  of  the  *  Archaeologia,' 
and  if  *  Luke  '  had  reasons   for  hoping  that  he  would  fin< 
something  useful  for  his  own  purposes  in  the  books  of  Josephi 
he  would  certainly  have  procured  them  without  delay  ai 
have  retained  some  fragments  of  them  in  his  memory.     At  ai 
rate,  *  Luke  '  certainly  did  not  serve  as  Josephus's  authority 
He  was  at  most  a  Christian  contemporary  of  the  historiai 
Nor  is  there  any  evidence  of  the  existence  of  the  Acts  before  tl 
second  century,  and  the  first  traces  of  it  are  very  uncertain, 
that  with  the  above  assignment  we  have  taken  into  account 
indications  which  can  help  us  to  form  an  opinion  of  its  date. 

4.  The  question  of  its  purpose  is,  however,  of  still  greater 
importance.  We  should  do  well,  if  we  do  not  wish  to  follow 
a  wrong  course  from  the  very  outset  in  seeking  for  the 
motive  which  underlies  the  Acts  (Tendenz),  to  keep  its  close 
connection  with  the  Gospel  clearly  before  our  eyes.  If  they 
really  stand  to  one  another  in  the  relation  of  Books  I.  and  I] 
of  a  larger  work,  it  is  unlikely  that  Book  II.  will  sen 
entirely  different  interests  from  Book  I.  Now,  the  writer 


§  ;JL'.]  THE    ACTS    OF    TIIK    APOSTLMS  437 

Luke  did  not  write  solely  in  order  to  satisfy  the  thirst  of  his 
contemporaries  and  of  posterity  for  information  as  to  a 
particular  field  of  history  ;  he  wrote  to  satisfy  his  own  faith, 
and  to  increase  the  convincing  power  of  that  faith,  convinced 
himself  that  this  could  best  be  done  by  making  as  accurate 
and  complete  a  description  as  possible  of  what  had  actually 
occurred.  We  did  not  observe  any  partisan  purpose  in  the 
Gospel,  either  in  the  Pauline  direction  or  in  that  of  endeavour- 
ing to  reconcile  the  Pauline  and  Jewish  Christian  factions ; 
and  this  alone  makes  us  somewhat  suspicious  of  the  party 
objects  which  the  Acts  are  said  to  have  served,  no  matter 
whether  the  book  is  regarded  as  a  defence  of  Paul  and 
of  his  Apostolic  rights,  or  as  the  programme  of  the  party 
of  union, — a  document  whose  object  was  to  wipe  out  the 
memory  of  the  differences  between  Peter  and  Paul.  And 
when  we  find  that  this  school  of  critics  (Tendenz-Kritiker) 
can  with  equal  ease  regard  Paul  as  approximated  to  Peter 
and  Peter  made  to  show  Pauline  characteristics,  our  impres- 
sion is  confirmed  that  the  writer  is  wrongly  credited  with 
•Mentions  where  in  reality  all  is  explained  by  ignorance,  by 
the  incompleteness  of  his  materials,  and  by  his  incapacity 
to  carry  himself  back  into  the  modes  of  thought  even  of  a 
just-departed  age.  It  is  true  that  in  the  Acts  the  parallelism 
between  Paul  and  Peter,  the  representative  of  Jewish 
Christianity,  is  very  far-reaching  alike  in  words,  deeds  and 
fortunes  :  both,  for  instance,  are  dreaded  by  evil  spirits,  both 
have  to  contend  with  sorcerers,  both  raise  the  dead,  both  are 
imprisoned  and  miraculously  released,  and  in  their  missionary 
practice  as  well  as  in  the  substance  of  their  preaching  they 
are  in  complete  accord.  Even  after  xxi.  24  Paul  walks  '  in 
obedience  to  the  Law,'  while  even  before  Paul's  first  mission 
to  the  Gentiles  Peter  had  recognised  in  the  case  of  the 
centurion  Cornelius  the  right  of  the  uncircumcised  to  the 
Gospel  and  to  the  possession  of  the  Spirit,  and  had 
unhesitatingly  drawn  the  logical  consequences  of  such  a 
view. 

Some  of  these  '  parallelisms,'  however,  are  undoubtedly 
founded  on  fact,  while  those  of  the  discourses  and  of  the 
religious  points  of  view  represented  in  them  are  merely  due 


438     AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  11. 

to  the  fact  that  '  Luke  '  himself  composed  the  declaration 
or  discourses  in  question  and  put  his  own  thoughts  into  th 
mouths  of  both  Apostles  ;  Paul  was  not  Judaised  nor  Pete 
Paulinised,  but  both  Paul  and  Peter  were  '  Lucanised,'  i. 
Catholicised,  and  any  further  coincidences  may  be  explaine 
by  the  fact  that  the  writer  possessed  but  one  scheme  for  th 
manifestation  of  Apostolic  power,  but  one  Apostolic  ideal,  in 
accordance   with   which   he   portrayed  both  Paul  and  Peter 
alike.     The  similarity  in  the  lives  of  the  two  is  also  far  from 
complete,  nor  is  there  the  slightest  reference  to  anything  o 
the  sort ;  the  many  sufferings  of  Paul  enumerated  in  2.  Corin 
thians  l — e.g.  the  '  perils  of  rivers  '  and  '  perils  of  robbers 
and  the  three  '  beatings  with  rods ' — are  omitted  by  the  Acts 
not   because   the  writer  could  not  discover  any  parallels  to 
them  in  the  lives  of  the  members  of  the  primitive  commu- 
nity, but   because  in  his  time  nothing  was  remembered 
to  these  experiences.     We  should  do  the  writer  of  Acts  a 
injustice   if,   instead   of   recognising   his   simple  pleasure  in 
telling  a  story,  we  continually  scented  some  hidden  motive 
not   only  where  he  probably  added  something   quite   freel 
to  the  tradition,  but  even  where  he  merely  reproduced  th 
tradition  or  where   he  omitted  certain  events   of   which  w 
know  from  other  sources.     Certainly  the  writer  meant  to 
more  than   a   mere  critical  historian   of   the  Church   or  i 
missions,   more  than  the  biographer  of  two  Apostles.     Th 
title  of  his  book,  (al)  7rpd%sis  (rwv)  atrodioK^v  (probably  no 
from  his  hand),  is  indeed  to  some  extent  misleading,  sin 
it  is  but  few  Apostles  of  whom  the  writer  has  anything  to 
tell  but  their  names,2  but  its  meaning  is  right  nevertheless  : 
he  wishes  to  bring  before  us  the  second  period  of  the  history  o 
salvation  and  of  the  Gospel  (as  in  the  Gospel  he  had  describe 
the   first  and   fundamental   epoch),  a  period   in   which   th 
Apostles,  the  fully  authorised  representatives  of  Jesus,  steppe 
into  the  place  of  their  acting  and  teaching  master.     Her 
as  in  the  Gospel,  the  result  expected  from  the  narrative  i 
that  the  divine  nature  of  the  story  should  be  self-attested ; 
every  unprejudiced  reader  was  to  say  to  himself  that  it  was 
solely  through  the  power  of  the  Holy  Ghost 3  that  the  Apostles 

1   xi.  23  fol.  -  i.  13.  3  i.  8. 


i 


§  32.]  THE    ACTS   OF   THE    APOSTLES  439 

had  been  able  to  perform  such  marvels  as  he  read  of  in  those 
twenty-eight  chapters.  The  most  striking  proof  of  this 
power  in  the  writer's  eyes  was,  of  course,  the  extraordinary 
spread  of  the  mission,  and  it  is  no  mere  chance  that  he 
breaks  off  at  Paul's  unhindered  two  years'  preaching  in 
Kome,  because  therein  is  fulfilled  the  programme  of  i.  8  : 
that  the  Apostles  should  be  the  witnesses  of  Jesus  'in 
Jerusalem  and  in  all  Judaea  and  Samaria  and  unto  the 
uttermost  parts  of  the  earth.'  Nevertheless  we  must  not 
label  the  Acts  '  A  History  of  the  Extension  of  the  Gospel  from 
Jerusalem  to  Borne,'  because  the  interest  of  the  book  is  not 
confined  merely  to  that  extension,  and  because  such  a  work 
would  then  have  required  the  supplement  of  a  third  volume 
describing  the  history  of  the  missions  beyond  the  Euphrates, 
on  the  one  hand,  and  beyond  Kome  on  the  other,  whereas 
the  writer  himself  clearly  looked  upon  his  bipartite  work 
as  finished  (xxviii.  31).  What  he  intended  to  write  was  a 
History  of  the  Power  of  God  in  the  Apostles.  He  looks  upon 
the  Apostles  as  representing  a  religious  potency  as  necessary 
as  Jesus  himself,  and  therefore  their  '  Acts '  deserved  a  place 
next  to  those  of  the  Saviour.  But  it  was  only  because  of  their 
peculiar  power  that  they  stood  so  high  :  anything  in  their 
lives  which  was  not  a  manifestation  of  that  power  is  not 
recorded  ;  we  are  told  nothing  of  their  early  history,  nothing 
of  their  death,  unless  indeed,  as  in  the  case  of  James,1  a 
miraculous  interposition  of  the  divine  power  was  connected 
with  it.  It  is  not  because  he  knew  nothing  of  it  that  the 
writer  omits  to  describe  the  deaths  of  Peter  and  of  Paul,  but 
because  he  could  not,  as  in  the  case  of  Christ,  describe  their 
subsequent  resurrection,  and  because  the  delight  felt  by  later 
generations  in  the  details  of  martyrdom,  as  such,  was  to 
him  unknown. 

If,  then,  the  sole  purpose  (Tendenz)  which  the  history  of  the 
Apostles  was  meant  to  serve  was  that  of  teaching  mankind 
to  realise  the  triumphant  advance  of  the  cause  of  God  through 
the  Apostles,  we  have  no  right  whatever  to  be  surprised  at 
finding  certain  considerable  gaps  in  the  report,  for  what 
was  alien  to  that  purpose  would  naturally  be  passed  over  in 

1  xii.  1  etc. 


440     AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  n. 

silence.  The  Acts  would  have  said  nothing,  for  instance, 
even  if  their  writer  had  been  fully  acquainted  with  the 
events,  as  to  the  dispute  between  Peter  and  Paul  at  Antioch 
described  in  Galatians,1  or  as  to  the  terrible  war  which 
Paul  had  been  obliged  to  wage  against  the  '  false  brethren  ' 
in  Jerusalem,  and  afterwards  in  so  many  of  his  own 
communities.  In  the  light  in  which  this  book  desires 
the  Apostolic  Age  to  be  regarded,  the  proceedings  at  the 
Council  of  Jerusalem  must  necessarily  wear  a  somewhat 
different  aspect  from  that  which  they  receive  in  the 
Epistle  to  the  Galatians.3  As  the  writer  meant  his  readers 
to  look  upon  the  Apostolic  Age,  so  he  himself  had  looked 
upon  it  all  his  life.  His  primary  object  was,  not  to 
mediate  between  Paul,  the  founder  of  the  free  Gentile 
Christianity,  and  the  rigidly  Catholic  Gentile  Christianity  of 
about  100  ;  rather  he  had  assumed  in  all  simplicity  that 
in  questions  of  salvation  all  the  Apostles  had  been  quite 
clear  and  wholly  at  one  among  themselves,  and  that  their 
faith  differed  in  nothing  from  the  faith  by  which  he  had 
himself  received  salvation  in  the  Church  of  his  time.  For 
his  public,  he  certainly  did  not  aim  at  any  one  class :  not 
only,  that  is,  at  a  particular  party  in  the  Church  whose 
antipathies  against  some  other  he  wished  to  heal,  even  though 
he  was  glad  to  be  able  to  point  to  the  friendly  co-operation 
between  Paul  and  the  community  of  Jerusalem,  since  the 
need  of  preaching  unity  was  not  wanting  in  his  own  time  ; 
not  only,  either,  at  unconverted  Gentiles  or  Jews,  before 
whom  he,  as  a  skilful  advocate,  sought  to  defend  the  Christian 
religion,  as  the  legitimate  heiress  of  the  Old  Testament 
revelation,  against  Jewish  calumnies  and  Jewish  ill-will 
towards  apostates  ;  nor,  finally,  at  the  officials  of  the  Eoman 
State  alone,  though  he  may  have  wished  to  convince  them 
of  the  political  harmlessness  of  the  disciples  of  Jesus,  as  of 
men  who  had  never  provoked  popular  tumults,  and  one  of 
whom,  Paul,  had  by  the  verdict  of  the  most  competent 
authorities,  the  Roman  Procurator  Festus,4  as  well  as  the 
Jewish  King  Herod  Agrippa, '  committed  no  crime  and  deserved 

1   ii.  11  etc.  2  ii.  4.  '  Ch.  ii. 

4  xxv.  25.  s  xxvi.  32. 


§  32.]  T1IK    ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES  441 

to  be  released.  He  addressed  his  book  to  none  of  these 
classes  exclusively,  for  three  fourths  of  what  he  wrote  would 
have  been  worthless  for  each  one  of  them.  We  certainly  do 
not  wish  to  deny  the  apologetic  tendency  of  the  book,  but 
this  is  merely  the  indirect  result  of  the  practical  tendency 
so  clearly  expressed  in  Luke  i.  4.  The  man  who  attempts 
from  the  inside  to  write  the  history  of  a  body  constantly 
lighting  for  its  existence  and  surrounded  on  all  sides  by 
hatred  and  calumny,  necessarily  becomes  an  Apologist,  though 
he  may  not  have  had  the  intention  of  producing  an  Apologetic 
work.  The  writer  of  Acts  presupposes  so  minute  an  interest 
on  the  part  of  his  readers  in  the  minor  adventures  of  his 
heroes — e.g.  in  ch.  xxvii. — that  it  is  impossible  to  look  for 
those  readers  without  the  pale  of  the  Church ;  his  purpose 
was  to  add  to  his  Gospel  a  second  work  of  edification  for  the 
benefit  of  his  fellow-believers.  This  practically  accounts  for 
all  the  preconceptions  with  which  he  entered  on  his  task 
and  all  the  points  of  view  which  influenced  him  in  carrying 
it  out ;  and  we  thereby  understand  the  reasons  which  induced 
the  writer  to  select  what  was  suited  to  his  purpose  from 
materials  which  may  occasionally  have  been  more  complete, 
and  even,  now  consciously  and  now  unconsciously,  as  in  the 
Gospel,  to  remodel  what  he  took.  According  to  his  own  ideas, 
however,  he  had  acted  strictly  as  an  historian  throughout. 

5.  This  brings  us  at  once  into  the  very  centre  of  the 
argument  as  to  the  historical  value  of  the  Acts.  Here  our 
conclusions  need  not,  as  we  know,  be  based  solely  upon 
internal  criticism,  or  on  probabilities ;  for  as  a  check  upon  the 
first  verses  we  possess  the  Gospels,  and  upon  the  second  and 
larger  half  of  the  book  the  Pauline  Epistles.  This  comparison, 
however,  entirely  confirms  the  results  of  an  examination  by 
internal  evidence, — namely,  that  in  this  document  we  find 
the  strangest  mixture  of  materials  of  faultless  excellence  with 
others  which  are  almost  useless.  Criticism  has  often  exag- 
gerated the  amount  of  the  latter,  as  the  Apologetic  school  has 
that  of  the  former.  The  accounts  of  the  Ascension  '  and  of 
the  death  of  the  traitor  Judas 2  are  obviously  mere  coarser 
versions  of  what  we  find  in  Luke  3  and  Matthew,4  nor  is  the 

1  i.  9  etc.  2  i.  78.  3  xxiv.51.  4  xxvii.  3  fol. 


442      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

Pentecost  story  of  the  Acts  tenable  beside  the  authentic  record 
of  the  speaking  with  tongues  in  1.  Corinthians  '  :  for  the 
Acts  tell  of  a  speaking  in  innumerable  different  languages, 
Paul  only  of  an  ecstatic  stammering  unintelligible  to  its 
hearers,2  and  thus  the  former  account  must  rest  upon  a 
gross  misunderstanding — inconceivable  in  a  contemporary 
of  those  who  possessed  the  gift — of  the  term  '  speaking  with 
tongues.'  Nowhere  in  the  New  Testament  do  the  purely 
legendary  elements  appear  more  conspicuously  than  in  the 
narratives  concerning  the  punishment  of  Ananias,'1  the 
miracles  of  Peter  in  Lydda  and  Joppa,4  his  deliverance  from 
prison 5  or  the  corresponding  deliverance  of  Paul  and  Silas  from 
the  dungeon  at  Philippi.0  Nor,  in  view  of  Galatians  ii.,  can 
the  baptism  of  Cornelius  possibly  have  taken  place  at  the 
time  assigned  to  it  in  the  Acts,7  for  at  the  considerably  later 
Apostolic  Council  of  Jerusalem  Peter  still  confines  himself 
exclusively  to  the  idea  of  preaching  to  the  Jews,8  and  hi 
subsequent  '  dissimulation  '  about  eating  with  the  Gentiles 
would  have  been  utterly  impossible  if  the  revelations  of 
Acts  x.  and  xi.  had  already  taken  place.  The  Acts  sa 
nothing  in  ix.  19-25  of  the  fact  that  Paul  was  working  in 
Arabia 10  between  his  conversion  and  his  expulsion  from 
Damascus,  and,  moreover,  the  picture  they  give  of  his  con 
version  is  quite  different  from  that  which  we  receive  fro 
Paul  himself  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians.11  Even  th 
parallel  reports  of  it  in  the  Acts  themselves  12  display  remark 
able  differences  when  compared  with  ix.  3-5.  The  statement 
of  Acts  13  as  to  Paul's  first  visit  to  the  primitive  community 
is  distinctly  shown  to  be  unhistorical  by  Galatians  i.  18-2 
nor  would  any  space  be  left  for  the  second  visit  in  the  face  of 
Galatians  i.  21-ii.  1.  The  Apostolic  Decree,  too,  cannot  have 
been  decided  upon  at  the  Apostolic  Council  of  Acts  xv., 
least  of  all  over  the  head  of  Paul,  as  here  described.  Again, 
the  Acts  represent  Paul  as  working  alone  at  Athens  and  only 
meeting  his  friends  Silas  and  Timothy,  whom  he  had  left  behin 

1  xii.-xiv.  2  1  Cor.  xiv.  2.  *  Ch.  v. 

*  Ch.  ix.  4  Ch.  xii.  6  xvi.  25-39. 

7  See  Ch.  x.  "  Gal.  ii.  7  and  8.  9  Gal.  ii.  11  etc. 

10  Gal.  i.  17.  ll  i.  15  fol. 

12  xxii.  5-16,  xxvi.  12-14.  l3  ix.  26  etc. 


§32.]  THE    ACTS    OF    TIIK    APOSTLES  443 

at  Beroea,  again  at  Corinth,1  but  this  is  in  direct  contradiction 
to  the  account  given  by  Paul  himself  in  1.  Thessalonians.-' 
Finally,  we  are  told  in  Acts  that  Paul  always  sought  out  the 
Synagogue  first  in  his  missionary  journeys  and  did  not  feel 
justified  in  devoting  himself  to  the  Gentiles  until  his  own 
compatriots  had  rejected  the  Crucified  Messiah, — an  incon- 
ceivable principle  of  action  for  Paul,  who  had  so  clearly 
recognised  in  Galatians  ;{  that  the  task  laid  upon  him  by  God 
was  that  of  working  among  the  Gentiles.4 

On  the  other  hand,  large  sections,  especially  in  the  second 
part,5  are  distinguished  by  the  greatest  clearness  and  know- 
ledge of  their  subject ;  nor  need  the  outline  of  Paul's  life 
after  the  Apostolic  Council  of  Jerusalem,  more  particularly  the 
order  in  which  he  visited  his  mission-stations,  and,  on  the 
whole,  the  occasional  time-indications,  be  mistrusted  by  the 
critic.  And  for  the  first  part,  too,  we  need  not  only  point  to 
certain  quite  unimpeachable  statements  like  that  of  the  execu- 
tion of  James,6  but  especially  to  the  fact  that  the  writer 
confines  himself  remarkably  closely  to  information  concerning 
the  life  of  Peter  (and  even  in  his  case  only  as  far  as  the  year 
52  or  thereabouts),  which  is  certainly  the  best  proof  that  he 
knew  practically  nothing  about  the  other  Primitive  Apostles, 
but  also,  on  the  other  hand,  that  he  did  not  seek  to  cover 
his  ignorance  by  bold  fabrications.  We  might  in  truth  speak 
of  the  modest  reserve  of  such  a  writer,  when  we  compare  his 
work  with  the  romances  which,  in  the  guise  of  more  complete 
Histories  of  the  Apostles,  afterwards  became  such  popular  and 
such  dangerous  reading. 

Probably  every  reader  acquainted  with  Thucydides  and 
Livy  will  agree  that  the  numerous  speeches  which  '  Luke ' 
puts  into  the  mouth  of  his  heroes,  the  most  elaborate  of  which 
he  gives  to  Stephen,7  but  others  in  like  manner  to  Peter,  and, 
on  several  very  various  occasions,  to  Paul,  are  in  a  greater  or 
less  degree  his  own  free  inventions.  (Here,  however,  we  must 
except  the  '  philologist '  Blass,  who  goes  so  far  as  to  refer  the 

1  xvii.  14  fol.  and  xviii.  5.  2  iii.  1  fol. 

3  ii.  8  fol.  4  See  above,  pp.  36,  37. 

5  E.g.,  the  voyage  of  Paul  from  Caesarea  to  Puteoli  and  his  arrival  in  Rome, 
xxvii.  1-xxviii.  16. 

6  xii.  2.  •  vii.  2-53, 


l 

\ 


444      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  n. 

lo-aaiv  of  Acts  xxvi.  4  to  Paul  himself  [instead  of  the  oiSaaw 
generally  used  in  the  New  Testament],  on  the  ground  that  he 
wished  to  show  so  distinguished  an  auditor  as  King  Herod 
Agrippa  that  he  knew  how  to  conjugate  his  Attic  Greek 
correctly !)  That  these  discourses  (including  the  counsel  of 
Gamaliel,1  the  letter  of  the  chief  captain  Lysias  to  the 
Procurator  at  Caesarea,2  the  letter  of  the  Apostles 3  and  the 
speeches  of  Festus  to  Agrippa  at  Paul's  trial4)  are  the 
creations  of  the  writer,  is  distinctly  seen  on  examining  the 
very  first  of  them,  in  which  Peter  tells  the  brethren  at 
Jerusalem  in  full  detail  a  story  of  Judas  which  had  long 
been  known  to  them,  but  which  the  writer  now  wishes  to 
impart  to  his  readers.  In  it  Peter,  the  Jew,  is  actually 
made  to  say  to  other  Jews  at  Jerusalem,  'And  it  becam 
known  to  all  the  dwellers  at  Jerusalem,  insomuch  that 
in  their  language  that  field  was  called  AJceldama,  that  is 
The  field  of  blood,'  while  farther  on 5  the  same  Peter  is 
made  to  say  to  his  fellow-believers  at  Jerusalem,  '  The  Lord 
hath  delivered  me  out  of  the  hand  of  Herod,  and  from  all  the 
expectation  of  the  people  of  the  Jews.'  In  most  of  these 
discourses,  such  as  that  speech  of  Paul's  on  the  Areopagus  '' 
which  is  so  much  admired  by  Curtius,  or  in  that  of  Stephen, 
there  is  much  that  might  well  have  been  said  by  the  speaker 
in  the  situation  described,  and  the  discourses  of  Peter  also 
have  a  more  Judaistic  or  Old  Testament  ring  than  those  of 
Paul,  but  this  only  proves  that  the  writer  possessed  good 
taste  and  a  certain  amount  of  historical  feeling,  just  as  he 
represents  Paul  as  speaking  differently  according  to  circum- 
stances— as  striking  an  entirely  different  note,  for  instance, 
in  his  farewell  speech  to  the  Ephesian  Presbyters  7  from  that 
in  his  missionary  address  to  the  Athenians.8  The  '  authen- 
ticity,' in  the  modern  sense,  of  these  discourses  is  impossible, 
first,  because  the  Paul  reflected  therein  has  no  more  in  com- 
mon with  the  Paul  whose  thoughts  and  expressions  have 
become  familiar  to  us  through  so  many  Epistles  than 
any  other  believer  might  have  had,  while  the  Stephen  they 
portray  takes  up,  even  before  Paul  has  become  a  Christian,  a 


1  v.  35-39.  i  ii.  26-30.  3  xv.  23-25.  4  xxv.  14-27. 

'  xii.  11.  6  xvii.  22-31.  "  xx.  18  etc.  8  xvii.  '11  etc. 


S  32.]  THE   ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES  445 

position  which  is  only  conceivable  as  the  hard-won  result  of 
Paul's  lifelong  labours  ;  secondly,  because  the  personality  of 
the  writer  of  Luke  and  thelfcts,  as  well  as  his  peculiarities 
of  language,  are  most  conspicuously  seen  in  these  discourses  ; 
thirdly,  because  it  is  impossible  to  understand  how  such 
skilfully  composed  orations  could  have  been  committed  to 
posterity,  since  no  one  thought  of  making  an  immediate 
record  of  them,  and  at  Athens  no  other  Christian  was  even 
present,  besides  the  speaker, — still  less,  of  course,  during  the 
conversations  between  the  captive  Paul  and  Felix,  Herod,  or 
Festus  ;  and,  lastly,  because  until  the  contrary  is  proved,  the 
same  judgment  must  be  pronounced  upon  the  discourses  in 
the  Acts  as  upon  all  other  discourses  woven  by  ancient  his- 
toriographers into  their  narratives  (those  sayings  of  Jesus 
plainly  compiled  by  the  Synoptics  out  of  isolated  sentences 
and  fragments  of  speeches  of  course  excepted),  namely,  that 
it  was  the  object  of  the  historian  to  make  his  principal  per- 
sonages express  their  own  characters  and  that  of  their  time 
in  a  rhetorical  work  of  art. 

On  the  other  hand,  a  most  satisfactory  proportion  of  the 
actual  events  related  in  the  Acts  is  derived  from  older  sources. 
The  most  important  of  these,  the  We-document— so-called 
because  it  is  written  in  the  first  person  plural — must  come 
directly  from  the  hand  of  a  travelling  companion  of  Paul's, 
who  from  time  to  time  recorded  in  the  rich  colours  of  actual 
experience,  and  most  probably  in  the  form  of  a  diary,  the 
events  in  which  he  himself  had  taken  part.  We  find  this 
'  we '  in  the  accounts  of  the  journeys  from  Troas  to  Philippi,1 
from  Philippi  to  Miletus  (for  the  last  time),2  from  Miletus  to 
Jerusalem  :i  and  from  Caesarea  to  Rome,4  and  since  its  state- 
ments are  never  open  to  the  slightest  objection,  the  idea  of 
looking  upon  the  '  we  '  as  a  deliberately  deceptive  fiction  of 
the  writer's  is  one  of  unusual  grotesqueness.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  attempt  to  identify  the  writer  of  the  Acts  with  the 
writer  of  the  We-document  is  hardly  less  audacious,  in  spite 
of  its  venerable  age  ;  the  terse,  matter-of-fact  tone  of  the 
*  we '  passages,  as  well  as  their  familiarity  with  the  actual 

1  xvi.  10-17.  2  xx.  5-15. 

3  xxi.  1-18.  4  xxvii.  1-xxviii.  10. 


446      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP. 

course  of  events,  forms  an  overwhelming  contrast  to  th( 
broad,  reflective  manner  and  the  artificial  constructions  of  th< 
other  portions ;  just  as  clearly,  for  instance,  as  the  first  hal 
of  chapter  xxviii.1  proclaims  itself  the  narrative  of  an  ey( 
witness,  so  is  the  last  half  (the  conversation  of  Paul  with  th( 
heads  of  the  Jewish  community  in  Kome 2)  seen  to  be 
fabrication,  introduced  by  one  who  was  completely  foreign 
the  state  of  things  in  Kome  at  that  time,  in  order  to  show  thai 
in  Kome  as  elsewhere  and  always,  the  Apostle  did  not  tui 
to  the  Gentiles  until  his  preaching  had  been  roughly  rejecl 
by  the  Jews.  The  undeniable  carelessness  implied  in  taking 
over  from  a  foreign  source  a  '  We '  which  certainly  did  not 
signify  the  writer,  is  not  greater  than  that  ascribed  to  him  by 
the  opposite  party,  according  to  whose  theories  Luke, 
drawing  from  his  own  fresh  recollection  and  now  making 
of  older  memoranda,  suddenly  begins  to  address  his  readers 
in  the  first  person,  without  either  having  introduced  the '  We ' 
or  explained  to  whom  it  referred,  and  then  as  suddenly  lets 
it  drop  again.  If  the  writer  of  the  Acts — and  of  Luke  as 
well — was  indeed  the  celebrated  friend  of  Paul,  he  must  have 
written  much  that  was  against  his  own  better  knowledge 
(e.g.  chapter  xv. )  ;  we  shall  appreciate  him  more  highly  if  we 
finally  renounce  the  search  for  his  name. 

The  We-document  must  of  course  have  originally  con- 
tained more  than  the  four  sections  mentioned  above.  It 
would  not  have  maintained  its  existence  from  generation  to 
generation  if  it  had  consisted  merely  of  three  or  four  pages 
of  a  traveller's  journal.  It  must  certainly  have  been  a  more  or 
less  connected  whole,  rich  in  information  concerning  Paul  and 
his  friends,  and  therefore  profoundly  welcome  to  every 
historian  of  the  Apostolic  Age.  In  some  passages  the  writer 
of  Acts  simply  incorporated  it  whole  for  convenience'  sake — 
not,  we  may  suppose,  in  servile  dependence  on  its  letter,  bui 
rather  with  additions  of  all  kinds,  such  as  the  refer- 
ence in  xxi.  8  to  vi.  3  and  5.  Elsewhere  he  made  excerpts 
from  it,  using  it  as  the  groundwork  for  his  own  more  highly 
coloured  pictures.  Perhaps  he  owes  to  it  all  the  really 
valuable  material  for  the  history  of  Paul  that  he  produces, 

1  Vv.  1-16.  2  Vv.  17-28. 


P 
re 

II 


§  3±]  THE   ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLUS  447 

especially  if  xi.  23  already  belongs  to  it.1  If,  as  tradition 
says  of  the  writer  of  Acts,  the  author  of  the  earlier  document 
was  a  Christian  of  Antioch,  this  would  explain  why  in  dealing 
with  the  history  of  Paul,  the  Acts  do  not  appear  to  attain  firm 
ground  until  his  labours  at  Antioch  come  to  be  narrated. 
Unfortunately,  it  is  impossible  to  decide  the  old  controversy 
as  to  which  of  the  companions  of  Paul  was  its  author — the 
claims  of  Silas,  Timothy,  Titus  and  Luke  have  all  been 
urged.  Those  who  are  impressed  by  the  fact  that  the  '  We ' 
breaks  off  at  xvi.  17  in  Philippi,  only  to  reappear  in  the  same 
town  a  few  years  later,-  are  perhaps  justified  in  giving  their 
imagination  free  play  and  assigning  the  preference  to  the 
physician  Luke,  who  may  then  have  practised  in  Philippi 
during  the  interval,  Silas  and  Timothy  having  left  Philippi 
along  with  Paul.  But  it  is  only  if  we  regard  the  whole 
book  as  the  work  of  the  '  We '  writer  that  the  fact  that 
Silas  and  Timothy  are  spoken  of  in  the  third  person  in 
xvii.  15,  while  Titus  and  Luke  are  never  mentioned  at  all, 
becomes  an  argument  against  the  authorship  of  either  of  the 
two  former ;  a  later  writer  making  use  of  the  We-document 
would  have  had  no  reason  for  suppressing  the  name  of  his 
authority,  unless  indeed  he  wished  to  be  mistaken  for  him  ; 
but  do  we  observe  any  traces  of  such  a  desire  in  the  Acts  ? 
In  my  opinion,  the  continuous  silence  maintained  by  the 
writer  of  Acts  concerning  Luke  is,  if  anything,  unfavourable 
to  the  hypothesis  of  Lucan  authorship ;  but,  on  the  other  hand, 
the  persistent  association  of  his  name  with  the  Gospel  and 
the  Acts  seems  to  point  towards  the  explanation  that  the  We- 
document  was  his  work.  The  recollection  that  it  was  precisely 
Luke  among  all  Paul's  friends  who  had  taken  valuable  notes  of 
their  journeys  might  have  subsisted  as  late  as  the  second 
century  ;  what  more  natural,  then,  than  to  ascribe  the  whole 
anonymous  work,  in  which  one  of  Paul's  companions  certainly 
did  appear  in  parts  as  the  speaker,  to  this  same  Luke? 
Small  weight  will  be  laid  on  the  discovery  that  the  Acts 
and  even  the  Gospel  in  certain  parts,  but  most  of  all  the 
'  We '  passages,  are  remarkably  rich  in  medical  terms,  and 
thus  betray  the  authorship  of  Luke  the  physician,  when  we 

1  See  below,  par.  G.  ~  xx.  5  fol. 


: 

of 

h: 


448     AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP. 

recognise  how  insignificant  are  those  terms  :    we  might 
well   say  that   Paul  was   a  gynaecologist   on   the  ground  of 
1.  Thessalonians  v.  3 !     But  if  we  were  right  in  deriving  t 
name   of  Matthew  as  applied   to   the   First  Gospel  from 
document  utilised  therein,  we  shall  be  able  with  the   same 
measure  of  probability  to  deduce  the  name  of  Luke  as  applied 
the  Third  Gospel  and  the  Acts  from  the  most  important  singl 
document  made  use  of  by  the  author  of  that  double  work. 

The  unknown  writer  of  the  Acts,  however,  would  n< 
have  confined  himself  here  any  more  than  in  the  Gospel 
one  authority — in  this  case  the  We-document.  It  is  tn 
that  he  omitted  to  make  any  systematic  use  of  the  Epistles 
of  Paul ;  such  a  possibility  probably  never  occurred  to  him. 
But  it  is  unquestionable  that  he  drew  part  of  the  information 
given  in  the  earlier  half  concerning  the  primitive  communit 
from  other  sources.  He  was  not  the  man  to  invent  the  name 
of  the  seven  ministers  to  the  poor  1  and  of  the  two  candidal 
for  the  Apostleship,  Barsabbas  and  Matthias,2  or  the  positive 
items  of  fact  concerning  Joseph,  surnamed  Barnabas  3 ;  such 
things  invariably  point  to  the  existence  of  earlier  written 
authorities.  Imperfect  mastery  of  the  available  materials 
would  also  be  the  best  explanation  for  certain  numerous  faults 
of  composition,  such  as  the  remarkable  duplicate  afforded  by 
iv.  32  fol.  and  v.  12-16  beside  ii.  42-47,  in  which  the  same 
general  description  of  the  state  of  things  in  the  community  of 
Jerusalem  had  already  been  given.  I  think  it  unlikely,  too,  if 
only  from  what  we  know  of  his  usual  practice  throughoul 
the  Gospel,  that  he  should  simply  have  spun  the  miracle 
stories  of  chapters  ii.-xii.  out  of  his  own  imagination  ;  they 
are  not  mere  reproductions  of  Gospel  material,  arid  the 
names  of  places  and  persons  which  they  contain  eeem  to 
favour  the  assumption  that  a  kernel  of  truth,  overgrown  with 
legendary  exaggerations,  is  to  be  found  in  them.  Their 
circulation  by  word  of  mouth  for  a  considerable  time  would 
easily  account  for  this  process,  but  in  my  opinion  it  is  scarcely 
possible  that  our  author  was  the  first  in  every  case  to  commit 
these  fragments  of  tradition  to  writing.  The  one-sidedness,  or 
rather  incompleteness,  of  his  story  in  chapters  i.-xii.  is  more 


i.  23. 


iv.  3G  fol. 


§  32.]  THE    ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES  449 

favourable  to  the  theory  that  he  was  dependent  on  inadequate 
written  authorities,  than  to  that  of  his  having  made  a  bad 
selection  from  a  stream  of  oral  tradition  still  steadily  flowing 
in  full  creative  force. 

It  is  accordingly  very  natural  that  many  attempts  have 
been  made  by  scientific  theologians  to  unravel  the  original 
documents  employed  in  the  Acts  in  as  complete  a  form  as 
possible.  But  no  satisfactory  results  have  yet  been  attained. 
Spitta's  hypothesis  is  original  and  at  first  sight  seductive :  an 
attempt  to  point  out  the  traces  of  two  parallel  histories  of  the 
Apostles  from  xxiv.  44  of  Luke  down  to  the  last  verse  of  the 
Acts,  so  that  the  writer  of  Acts  would  in  reality  have  had  no 
more  to  do  than  to  add  and  piece  together  different  portions 
of  these  narratives.  The  weak  side  of  this  theory  seems  to 
be  that  everything  good  and  authentic  is  heaped  together 
into  the  one  authority  (A),  and  everything  incredible  and 
unimportant  into  the  other  (B).  Moreover,  much  is  assigned 
to  B  which  to  all  appearances  is  the  peculiar  property  of  the 
author  of  the  present  book  of  Acts.  The  assumption  that 
the  first  half  of  the  Acts  is  based  on  several  written  pre- 
decessors finds  greater  favour  even  with  strictly  conservative 
critics  :  '  Acts '  of  Philip,  Peter,  Stephen  and  Barnabas  have 
all  been  mentioned,  and  even  the  '  Ktfpvy/Jia '  of  Peter  has 
been  added  to  the  list,  while  Blass  is  willing  to  allow  that 
Hebrew  or  Aramaic  documents  were  made  use  of  by  Luke  in 
these  first  twelve  chapters.  As  a  natural  reaction  against 
the  subjectivism  of  such  theory-mongering,  others,  among 
whom  is  H.  Wendt,  prefer  to  extend  the  one  well-authenti- 
cated authority  in  the  second  part  to  greater  and  greater 
dimensions,  until  at  last  it  contains  materials  for  almost 
every  portion  of  the  Acts.  Not  only  is  it  made  to  form  the 
basis  of  chapter  xiii.,  to  contain  the  great  speeches  of  Paul  at 
Athens,  at  Miletus  and  before  Agrippa,  but  it  is  even  said  that 
the  story  of  Stephen,  connected  with  xiii.  1  through  viii.  1,  4 
and  xi.  19  fol.  and  27  fol.,  was  taken  from  it ;  while  as  introduc- 
tion to  this,  again,  certain  passages  out  of  chapters  ii.-v.  are 
required,  describing  the  ideal  state  of  things  in  the  early  days 
of  the  primitive  community.  Wendt  himself  is  distinguished 
by  a  cautious  reserve  in  the  matter  of  reconstruction,  but  he 

G  G 


450      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

surely  cannot  be  on  the  right  track  in  viewing  the  We-docu- 
ment  as  he  does.  He  contends  that  it  consisted  not  only  of 
the  writer's  memoirs  concerning  his  own  actual  experiences, 
but  was  in  nuce  a  history  of  Paul  and  of  the  Mission  to  the 
Gentiles.  But  if  it  embraced  so  many  points  of  view  and 
inserted  such  long — and  of  course  fictitious — speeches  of  the 
Apostle,  it  becomes  an  alter  ego  of  our  own  Acts,  and  I  see  no 
further  reason  for  refusing  to  ascribe  the  whole  book  to  the 
writer  of  the  We-document.  The  more  closely  we  assimilate 
the  supposed  original  document  (or  documents)  to  the  present 
Acts  of  the  Apostles,  in  bulk,  composition  and  purpose,  the 
more  thoroughly  do  we  undermine  the  foundations  of  the 
true  critical  position  :  the  book  can  only  be  understood,  from 
an  historical  point  of  view,  as  a  new  phenomenon  in  Christian 
literature ;  it  loses  all  meaning  if  it  had  a  number  of  pre- 
cursors, possibly  out  of  different  camps.  The  unknown 
writer  certainly  utilised  earlier  documents — as  many  of  them 
as  he  could  by  any  means  lay  hold  of — and  very  probably  one 
in  which  Jerusalemic  material  preponderated  as  well  as  the 
journal  originating  in  the  Pauline  circle.  But  he  subordi- 
nated these  materials  to  his  own  language  and  ideas  with  far 
greater  freedom  than  in  the  Gospel — except  where  it  suited 
him  to  be  a  copyist  pure  and  simple  ;  he  shows  himself 
indeed  more  than  a  mere  editor  of  the  Acts  ;  had  he  been 
nothing  more,  his  work  in  that  capacity  would  have  been  so 
brilliant  and  so  skilful  that  it  would  be  impossible  to  believe 
him  satisfied  with  such  a  part. 

We  will  refrain,  therefore,  from  pursuing  a  shadow,  and  will 
let  the  reconstruction  of  the  sources  of  the  Acts  alone  until  we 
light  upon  some  parallel  work  of  the  earliest  times  which  will 
enable  us  to  apply  synoptic  criticism  in  this  case  also.  We 
should  rather  congratulate  ourselves  that  the  author  of  Acts 
followed  any  older  documents  at  all  in  telling  the  story  of  the 
first  thirty  years  of  the  Church.  Above  all,  we  must  not  for- 
get that  what  we  now  possess  is  his  own  work,  not  that  of  his 
authorities  ;  he  adopted  the  material  which  he  found  already 
existing  in  oral  or  written  tradition,  but  moulded  it  accord- 
ing to  his  own  ideas  of  edification  and  truth.  His  ideas, 
however,  were  identical  with  those  of  the  average  Christianity 


§  32.]  THE   ACTS   OP   THE   APOSTLES  451 

of  his  time,  except  that  in  him  they  were  ennobled  by  higher 
culture  and  a  more  loving  study  of  the  sacred  story  ;  in  the 
Acts,  therefore,  we  may  say  that  the  Gentile  Church  of  the 
beginning  of  the  second  century  codified  the  best  of  what  she 
knew  concerning  the  first  period  of  her  history.  We  cannot 
over-estimate  the  value  of  a  book  to  which,  perhaps,  we  do 
not  exactly  owe  our  comprehension  of  the  Apostolic  Age,  but 
to  which  we  are  very  largely  indebted  for  our  ability  to  use  the 
oldest  documents,  the  Epistles  of  Paul,  towards  such  a  com- 
prehension. From  the  aesthetic  point  of  view  the  Acts  also 
deserve  high  praise;  they  have  the  same  true-hearted 
warmth,  the  same  smooth,  agreeable,  conversational  tone  and 
the  same  tactful  abstinence  from  crude  effects  as  the  Gospel : 
they  are,  in  fact,  the  ideal  of  an  ecclesiastical  history. 

6.  The  philologist  Blass  believes  himself  to  have  set  the 
entire  criticism  of  the  Acts  upon  a  new  foundation.  The  fact 
that  its  text  has  come  down  to  us  in  two  very  different 
recensions  was  indeed  not  unknown  before  his  day,  but  not 
enough  was  made  of  it.  Besides  the  text  given  in  most  of 
the  Greek  manuscripts  and  used  as  the  foundation-stone  of 
the  Acts  in  all  critical  editions  of  the  New  Testament,  there 
exists  another,  represented  by  the  Greece-Latin  Codex  D,1 
by  a  Syriac  and  an  Egyptian  translation 2  and  by  a  series  of 
Old-Latin  quotations.  This  text  could  not  have  arisen  out  of 
mere  false  readings,  copyists'  errors  and  other  accidental 
corruptions,  but  when  compared  with  the  accepted  text 
presents  an  appearance  of  individuality  and  in  many  places 
•even  of  greater  antiquity.  As  early  as  1848  F.  A.  Bornemann 
pointed  out  the  superiority  of  this  Western  text  over  the 
Eastern  (for  convenience'  sake  we  may  call  them  fi  and 
a  respectively)  and  looked  upon  a  as  the  work  of  Alexan- 
drian Eevisers.  Blass  3  also  recognises  two  different  recen- 
sions, but  since  these  are  remarkably  alike  in  style,  he 
ascribes  both  fi  and  a  to  the  same  writer — that  is,  to  the 
author  of  Acts — and  considers  that  in  fi  we  have  his  sketch 
or  first  draught,  while  a  represents  the  terser,  clearer  and 
more  carefully  written  fair  copy.  In  1895  Blass  published 

1  See  §  52,  par.  2.  2  See  §  53,  par.  3  c. 

3  First  in  Theologische  Studien  und  Kritiken  for  1894,  pp.  86-119. 


452      AN   INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHIP.  n. 

a  '  Philological  Edition  '  of  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles,  equipped 
with  introduction,  critical  apparatus,  running  commentary 
and  exhaustive  indices,  but  based  only  on  the  a  text;  this 
was,  however,  followed  in  1896  by  a  similar  edition  of  /3 : 
'  Acta  Apostolorum  secundurn  formam  quae  videtur  romanam.' 
The  flights  of  literary  and  historical  fancy  with  which  Blass 
adorned  his  hypothesis  in  the  complacent  prefaces  to  these 
editions — his  picture  of  the  eagerness  of  the  humble  Luke  to 
present  his  opus  to  the  distinguished  Asiatic  Theophilus  in  as 
polished  a  Greek  as  possible,  and  of  the  pressure  of  the 
Eoman  Christians  to  be  allowed  to  use  at  least  the  sketch, 
since  a  second  example  of  this  fair  copy  was  not  so  easily 
obtainable — all  this  threatened  to  divert  attention  from  the 
main  fact,  that  of  the  existence  of  two  recensions  of  the  text, 
which  it  is  the  lasting  merit  of  Blass  to  have  pointed  out. 
Both  merit  and  danger  were  increased,  however,  when  Blass 
affirmed l  that  the  same  state  of  things  also  existed  in  the  case 
of  the  Gospel  of  Luke.  He  was  not  disconcerted  by  the  fact 
that  here  the  Western  text,  or  /3,  is  the  more  concise  and 
displays  signs  of  greater  care  in  the  removal  of  difficulties 
of  form  and  matter  ;  here,  too,  he  considers  that  a  and  /3 
stand  to  one  another  in  the  relation  of  sketch  to  fair  copy, 
except  that  this  time  0  represents  the  latter.  Blass  has  a 
neat  historical  explanation  of  this  fact :  his  view  is  that  when 
Luke  came  to  Borne  with  the  captive  Paul,  he  brought  with 
him  his  Gospel — which  he  had  written  and  published  in 
Palestine  between  the  years  54  and  56 — and  presented  his 
Roman  brethren  with  a  copy  of  it — not,  however,  without 
polishing  the  text,  and,  more  especially,  adding  certain  things 
to  it  which  he  had  preferred  to  suppress  in  Palestine  and 
Syria  out  of  consideration  for  the  Jews.  Then  in  Rome  he 
proceeded  to  write  his  second  great  work,  the  Acts,  between 
57  and  59  ;  of  this— as  was  only  fair  ! — the  Romans  kept  the 
first  draught,  while  Luke  prepared  an  improved  edition  for 
Theophilus  and  the  Christians  of  the  East. 

Of  course,  no  one  is  justified  in  assigning  the  Acts  or  Luke  to 
a  date  some  twenty  to  forty  years  earlier,  simply  because  a  second 

1  See  his  edition    of  Luke    'secunduin  formam  quae  videtur  romanam,' 
published  in  18D7. 


§  32.]  THE   ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES  453 

recension  of  their  texts  is  brought  to  light ;  the  considerations 
brought  forward  above  in  support  of  their  later  date  retain 
their  full  value  notwithstanding  both  Blass  and  Savonarola. 
We  have  in  any  case  admitted  that  one  reporter  was  an  eye- 
witness, and  not  even  Blass's  hypothesis  can  take  us  any 
further.  The  only  questions  open  to  discussion  are  those  as 
to  whether  both  recensions  of  both  books  are  really  from  the 
hand  of  the  same  author,  and,  if  so,  which  is  the  earlier  ver- 
sion in  each  case.  The  enthusiastic  approval  with  which  Blass 
was  greeted  in  the  case  of  the  Acts  was  naturally  not  repeated 
in  that  of  the  Gospel ;  men  like  Zahn  and  Vogel,  who  are 
inclined  to  accept  the  view  that  Luke  himself  produced  two 
editions  of  the  Acts,  find  it  impossible  to  admit  that  the  author 
of  the  Gospel  made  a  revised  version  of  the  latter  work,  but 
consider  that  the  insertion  of  numerous  glosses  is  sufficient 
explanation.  Hilgenfeld,  again,  in  his  'Acta  Apostolorum 
graece  et  latine  secundum  antiquissimos  testes '  (1899),  while 
giving  the  preference  with  almost  greater  obstinacy  than 
Blass  to  the  ft  text,  does  not  regard  a  as  a  second  and  improved 
version  from  the  hand  of  the  same  author,  but  returns  on  that 
question  to  the  point  of  view  of  Bornemann.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  priority  of  a  even  in  the  case  of  the  Acts  has  been 
energetically  affirmed  by  Corssen,Eamsay,  B.  Weiss  in  his  'Der 
Codex  D  in  der  Apostelgeschichte '  (1897)  and  Adolf  Harnack 
in  his  brilliant  investigations  l  into  the  original  text  of  the 
Apostolic  Decree  (Acts  xv.  28  fol.),  of  Acts  xi.  27  fol.  and  of 
Acts  xviii.  1-27.  Many  others  consider  that  the  original  text 
of  Acts  is  to  be  found  neither  in  a  nor  /3,  but  lies  between  or 
behind  them,  so  that  we  should  be  obliged  to  ascertain  the 
true  reading  separately  in  each  case  of  doubt  by  a  careful 
selection  from  both  the  existing  versions,  neither  of  which  has 
come  down  to  us  intact.  The  ideas  of  A.  Pott 2 — who,  how- 
ever, again  tries  to  combine  questions  of  literary  with  those 
of  textual  criticism — are  particularly  ingenious  ;  he  considers 
that  the  valuable  variants  supplied  by  ft  were  taken  from 
the  We-document,  the  true  Acta  Pauli.  This,  he  believes, 

1  Sitzungsberichte  der  kviiigl.  preuss.  Akademie  der  Wisseiischaft,  1899, 
pp.  150  fol.  and  316  fol.,  and  1900,  pp.  2  fol. 

2  Der  Abendl&ndische  Text  der  Apostelgesch.  und  die  Wir-Quelle  (1900). 


454      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

continued  to  exist  for  a  time  even  after  it  had  been  incorporated 
in  parts  into  our  Acts  ;  a  few  copies  of  a  were  corrected  by 
the  light  of  it,  at  first  in  the  form  of  marginal  notes,  and 
these  again  gave  rise  to  the  earliest  versions  of  /3.  And  in 
effect  there  are  certain  insertions  in  /3,  such  as  that  of  Myra 
as  a  stopping-place  after  Patara,1  or  the  words  *  we  stayed  in 
Trogilia '  between  the  departure  from  Samos  and  the  arrival 
at  Miletus,2  or  the  detail  mentioned  in  verse  xxviii.  16, 
'  the  centurion  delivered  the  prisoners  to  the  stratopedarch,' 
which  sound  as  though  they  were  based  on  good  authority. 
But  Pott's  hypothesis  is  wrecked  once  for  all  by  the  fact  that 
these  peculiarities  of  ft  extend  over  the  whole  of  the  book, 
not  even  omitting  the  discourses  :  thus  in  iii.  3  we  have  in  j3 
1  and  he  cast  his  eyes  upwards  and  saw '  as  against  the  '  who, 
seeing '  etc.  of  a ;  in  v.  35  the  words  '  and  he  spake  to  the 
rulers  and  them  that  sat  b}7 '  instead  of  the  mere  '  and  he  said 
unto  them '  of  a  ;  in  xii.  10  the  additional  words  '  and  went 
down  the  seven  steps  '  beside  the  '  and  passed  on  through  one 
street '  of  a,  and  finally  in  xxiii.  29  the  sentence  '  When  I 
found  that  this  man  was  accused  about  nought  but  certain 
matters  of  the  law  of  Moses  and  about  one  Jesus,  but  had  done 
nothing  worthy  of  death,  I  released  him  with  difficulty  by 
force,'  in  the  letter  of  Lysias,  instead  of  the  shorter  version  of 
a,  '  whom  I  found  to  be  accused  about  questions  of  their  law, 
but  to  have  nothing  laid  to  his  charge  worthy  of  death  or  of 
bonds.'  If  the  extra  matter  in  /3  were  derived  from  the  We- 
document,  the  latter  must  have  been  as  long  as  the  Acts  them- 
selves (see  par.  5),  and,  moreover,  how  are  we  to  explain  the 
omissions  from  a  which  are  also  to  be  observed  in  /3 3  ? 
Besides  this,  however,  Harnack  has  proved  beyond  dispute 
that  ft  is  a  later  recension  of  a  dating  from  the  years  between 
100  and  140 ;  when  Gamaliel  prophesies  in  fi :  'ye  will  not 
be  able  to  overthrow  them,  neither  ye  nor  emperors  nor 
tyrants,'  while  in  a  the  italicised  words  are  absent,4  it  is 
clear  that  the  writer  is  there  drawing  upon  his  experiences  in 
the  period  of  State  persecution.  So  too,  when  he  converts  the 


1  Verse  xxi.  1.  -  xx.  16. 

3  E.g.,  xxvii.  11  and  large  parts  of  verses  12  and  13  as  well  as  of  ix.  12. 

4  v.  39. 


§  32.]  THE    ACTS   OF   THE    APOSTLES  455 

Apostolic  Decree  from  a  compromise  in  matters  of  ceremonial 
into  a  code  of  morals — omitting  the  prohibition  of  '  things 
strangled,'  turning  the  clause  enjoining  abstention  from 
blood  into  a  commandment  to  do  no  murder,  and  supplying  a 
new  fourth  clause  in  the  sentence  '  Whatsoever  ye  would  not 
that  men  should  do  unto  you,  do  not  ye  unto  others  ' — then 
we  may  know  that  we  have  the  words  of  a  man  of  the  second 
century  at  earliest  before  us.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  we 
may  not  descend  any  later  because  by  the  year  200  we  find 
his  text  already  dominant  in  the  West. 

A  few  of  the  peculiar  readings  of  ft  certainly  deserve  to  be 
given  the  preference  over  the  universally  accepted  versions 
of  a,  but  the  great  majority  of  them  are  the  work  of  an 
emendator  of  the  Acts,  who  again  had  his  own  imitators, 
for  the  very  readings  of  ft  are  not  all  from  the  same 
hand.  This  man's  chief  desire  was  to  attain  a  certain  ideal 
of  clear  consistency  in  the  narrative  by  inserting  colourless 
connecting  links  between  the  sentences,  but  also  to  force  a 
stronger  impression  upon  his  readers  by  adding  certain 
amplificatory,  broadening,  sometimes  even  vulgarising,  touches 
of  detail,  while  occasionally  he  even  altered  from  the  mere  joy 
of  altering7,  the  mere  necessity  of  doing  something.  Passages 
like  xix.  14  are  characteristic  of  his  manner ;  here  the  ft  text 
has :  '  And  among  these  the  sons  of  a  certain  ruler  named 
Sceva  wished  to  do  these  things,  men  who  were  reputed  to  be 
exorcists  of  such  persons.  And  when  they  were  entered  in 
unto  the  man  with  the  evil  spirit  they  began  to  utter  the  Name 
and  said,  We  command  thee  by  Jesus,  whom  Paul  preacheth, 
to  go  out  of  him.'  This  is  four  times  as  long  as  the  version 
of  a,  but  where  does  it  betray  the  slightest  independent  infor- 
mation over  and  above  that  of  a  ? 

Finally,  since  the  Codex  D  and  all  the  manuscripts  based 
upon  it  possess  a  text  which  differs  with  remarkable  frequency 
from  the  oldest  Greek  versions,  even  in  the  case  of  the 
Gospels — and  not  only  that  of  Luke — and  since  it  must  be 
admitted  that  in  this  instance  also  its  tendency  is  to  give  an 
artificially  natural  appearance  to  the  text,  by  simplifying  and 
smoothing  it  down  in  accordance  with  later  taste,  it  cannot  be 
of  any  use  to  us  in  deciding  questions  of  Introduction  in  the 


456      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  u. 

case  of  the  narrative  books  of  the  New  Testament.  Apart 
from  the  few  good  readings  which,  in  spite  of  its  corruptions,  it 
has  preserved,  the  one  thing  it  teaches  us  beyond  any  doubt  is 
that  at  the  time  this  recension  was  made  the  sacred  texts 
were  not  yet  regarded  with  any  very  great  respect ;  any  scribe 
who  could  express  them  in  better,  clearer,  more  concise  or 
more  emphatic  language  did  so  without  hesitation.  The 
sayings  of  Jesus  remained  comparatively  immune  from  attack, 
but  less  compunction  was  already  shown  towards  the  dis- 
courses of  the  Apostles  in  the  Acts,  while  the  parts  which 
suffered  most  from  such  arbitrary  treatment  were  those  pro- 
ceeding from  the  Evangelist  himself,  the  narrative  framework. 
But  it  is  not  to  be  wondered  at  that  the  reviser  sometimes 
made  use  of  the  very  language  and  ways  of  putting  things 
of  the  writer  whom  he  was  victimising  ;  the  author  of  Luke 
treated  his  authorities  in  the  same  way,  perhaps  with  full 
intention. 

The  hypotheses  of  Blass  are  indeed  of  no  importance 
for  the  history  of  the  origin  of  the  Lucan  writings,  but 
shed  much  light  upon  that  of  their  subsequent  propagation, 
nor  is  Blass  without  some  merit  as  a  commentator ;  while  as 
an  historian  he  may  be  particularly  proud  of  having  shattered 
our  confidence  in  the  '  tradition  '  on  a  few  important  points 
— unwittingly,  it  may  be,  but  still  most  thoroughly. 


§  83.  Retrospective  Survey  of  tlic  Twenty-seven  Books  of 
the  New  Testament 

Everyone  possessed  of  any  religious  sense  must  feel 
how  much  is  common  to  all  the  twenty-seven  books  of  the 
New  Testament ;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  this  relatively  small 
domain  presents  us  with  the  greatest  contrasts  that  it  is 
possible  to  conceive.  The  latest  of  its  documents  are 
separated  from  the  earliest  by  a  full  century ;  the  years 
between  50  and  70  may  have  witnessed  the  appearance  of 
the  ten  Pauline  Epistles,  as  well  as  of  the  We-document,  the 
Logia  of  Matthew  and  the  original  source  of  the  Apocalypse, 


§  33.]   RETROSPECTIVE  SURVEY  OF  BOOKS  OF  N.  TEST.   457 

those  between  70  and  100  that  of  the  three  Synoptics, 
Hebrews,  the  Apocalypse  and  probably,  also,  though  only  by 
a  narrow  margin,  Acts  and  1.  Peter.  Then  in  the  beginning 
of  the  second  century  come  the  Gospel  and  the  three 
Epistles  of  John,  Jude  a  little  later,  the  Pastoral  Epistles 
probably  after  125,  and  James  and  2.  Peter  last  of  all.  In 
bulk  too,  how  complete  is  the  gradation  from  2.  John,  with  its 
twenty-five  lines  or  so,  to  Luke,  more  than  a  hundred 
times  as  long  !  The  Epistle  to  Philemon  is  a  private  letter, 
written  to  an  individual  and  intended  but  for  a  single  reading, 
and  1.  Thessalonians  is  the  unpretending  address  of  a 
pastor  to  his  distant  flock  ;  but  opposed  to  these  we  have  the 
Apocalypse  with  its  threats  against  any  hearer  who  should 
injure  the  sacred  revelation  by  additions  or  suppressions,1 
and  2.  Peter  with  its  artificial  means  of  assuring  itself 
universal  and  obedient  recognition.  Comparison  is  scarcely 
possible  between  the  Greek  of  the  Apocalypse  and  that  of 
Hebrews,  and  still  less  so  between  the  mental  atmospheres 
which  surround  the  two.  It  would  be  impossible  for  two 
branches  of  literature  to  be  more  opposed  to  one  another 
than  those  represented  by  the  genuine  Pauline  Epistles  and 
the  Acts,  or  the  Gospel  of  Mark  and  the  Apocalypse.  It  was 
not  so  easy  as  we,  after  two  thousand  years  of  growing  use, 
are  wont  to  imagine,  to  regard  the  story  of  Jesus  as  told  by 
Mark  and  Luke  as  authentic,  and  yet  to  display  the  same 
respect  for  a  work  whose  claims  were  so  wholly  different  as 
those  of  John.  Finally,  however,  the  mental  endowments, 
and  especially  the  literary  capacity,  of  the  writers  with  whom 
we  are  here  dealing  are  enormously  varied  in  degree ;  the 
well-meaning  bluntness  of  Jude,  for  instance,  is  almost  unen- 
durable beside  the  profundity  of  Paul.  And  yet  the  Church 
was  insensible  to  all  these  contrasts  and  actually  put  together 
the  twenty-seven  works  in  question,  written  as  they  were  by 
at  least  twelve  different  authors,  into  one  book,  and  treated 
it,  moreover,  from  beginning  to  end  as  a  single  entity.  The 
indifference  of  the  Primitive  Church  as  to  the  forms  in  which 
she  possessed  and  handed  down  her  most  sacred  writings  (for 
none  of  her  members  intended  to  exercise  any  creative  faculty 

'  xxii.  18  and  19. 


458       AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

in  this  respect,  or  to  introduce  a  new  genre  into  literature) 
certainly  assisted  such  a  process ;  nevertheless,  considering 
the  immense  amount  of  difficulties  to  be  overcome,  it  was 
accomplished  in  a  marvellously  short  time.  It  will  now  be 
our  task  to  ascertain  the  guiding  forces  behind  this  process, 
the  actual  motives  which  led  to  the  collection  and  canonisa- 
tion of  the  twenty-seven  Books  of  the  New  Testament. 


PAET    II 

THE  HISTORY   OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT  CANON 


[Cf.  J.  Kirchhofer,  '  Quellensammlung  zur  Gesch.  des  N. 
T.lichen  Canons  bis  auf  Hieronymus '  (1844) :  still  useful  as  a 
collection  of  authorities,  though  the  the  author's  notes  are 
worthless.  A  convenient  arrangement  of  documents  for  the  early 
history  of  the  Canon  in  Preuschen,  '  Analecta,'  1893,  pp.  129- 
171.  C.  A.  Credner,  '  Gesch.  des  N.  T.lichen  Kanons,'  edited  by 
G.  Volkmar  (1860)  :  displays  the  faults  rather  than  the  merits  of  the 
Giessen  theologians,  who  have  done  much  good  work  for  the  science 
of  Introduction.  F.  Overbeck,  '  Zur  Gesch.  des  Kanons,'  1880  : 
unhappily  only  two  fragments  of  a  history  of  the  Canon,  combining 
the  most  perfect  mastery  of  material  and  method  with  the  greatest 
possible  freedom  from  prejudice.  P.  W.  Schmiedel  in  Ersch  und 
Gruber's  '  Encyclopadie  der  Wissenschaften,  etc.'  Sect.  ii.  vol.  32 
(1882),  pp.  309-337  :  an  admirably  clear  and  instructive  outline,  the 
main  features  of  which  were  carried  out  in  C.  Weizsacker's  Kanzler- 
rcde  of  Nov.  6,  1892,  3-16.  T.  Zahn  aims  at  giving  a  comprehensive 
presentation  of  the  subject  in  his  '  Geschichte  des  N.  T.lichen 
Kanons,'  in  3  vols.  At  present  there  have  appeared  vol.  i.  (968  pp.), 
1888-89  (the  New  Testament  before  Origen)  and  vol.  ii.  (1022pp.), 
1890-92  (the  earliest  authorities  and  the  evidence  required  for  the 
1st  and  3rd  vols.) ;  vol.  iii.  will  give  the  history  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment Canon  from  the  time  of  Origen.  We  must  add  to  these  the 
6  vols.  of  his  '  Forschungen  zur  Geschichte  des  N.  T.lichen 
Kanons  und  der  altkirchlichen  Literatur,'  which  began  to  appear 
in  1881,  and  of  which  only  the  fourth  (1891)  and  fifth  (1893)  contain, 
besides  special  researches  by  Zahn,  similar  work  by  J.  Haussleiter 
and  others.  Zahn's  work  has  great  merits  :  the  supplementary 
matter  is  especially  useful ;  but  the  history  of  the  New  Testament 
before  Origen  is  almost  a  piece  of  special  pleading,  an  attempt,  by 
many  of  Hofmann's  methods  of  exegesis  and  criticism,  to  overturn 


460       AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAI-. 

the  best-established  results  of  former  research,  in  the  supposed  inter- 
ests of  Christianity,  and  to  maintain  that  in  the  third  generation 
after  Christ  (c.  100)  the  principal  parts  at  least  of  the  New  Testament 
were  already  '  an  actively  working  authority  recognised  as  bind- 
ing in  all  parts  of  the  Church.'  The  most  emphatic  contra- 
diction was  given  to  Zahn  by  A.  Harnack  in  his  pamphlet,  '  Das 
neue  Testament  um  das  Jahr  200 '  (1889) — an  effective  grouping 
of  the  counter  arguments.  Harnack's  '  Dogmengeschichte,'  1888, 
vol.  i.,  contains  a  complete  statement  of  his  view  of  the  case. 
A.  Loisy 's  '  Histoire  du Canon  du  N.T.'  (1894, 305  pp.)  is  written  with 
much  lucidity,  in  the  spirit  of  B.  Simon,  and  in  spite  of  all  its 
dependence  on  Zahn,  avoids  the  intrusiveness  and  ambiguity  of  the 
latter's  apologetic  tone  ;  but  in  the  1st  and  3rd  Parts  the  Catholic 
Doctor  of  Theology  in  him  too  often  stifles  the  learned  historian  : 
see,  for  instance,  p.  18,  note  1 :  '  Je  suppose  que  le  Clement  dont 
parle  Hermas  est  le  celebre  eveque  de  Eome,  et  que  le  livre  du 
Pasteur  s'est  repandu  dans  les  communautes  chretiennes  avec  son 
approbation'  B.  F.  Westcott's  '  A  General  Survey  of  the  History 
of  the  Canon  of  the  New  Testament '  (ed.  6,  1889)  is,  in  spite 
of  its  apologetic  tendencies,  a  work  of  sterling  value,  and  well 
qualified  as  an  introduction  to  the  study  of  the  material.] 


CHAPTEE   I 

THE    FEE-CANONICAL    PERIOD    OF    NEW    TESTAMENT    LITERATURE 

§  34.  The  Canonical  Authorities  of  the  Apostolic  Age 

1.  From  its  very  birth,  Christianity  was  a  book-religion. 
Nor  is  this  statement  of  Holtzmann's  in  any  wise  upset  by 
the  solemn  contradiction  of  B.  Weiss  :  '  Thank  God,  that  is 
not  the  case.'  The  assertion  that  'Christianity  was  Life 
from  the  beginning,  and  because  this  Life  pulsates  in  its 
records,  they  cannot  be  interpreted  and  understood  on  the 
theory  of  the  indebtedness  of  the  one  to  the  other,'  con- 
stitutes no  antithesis  to  the  assertion  that  it  is  a  book- 
religion.  This  means,  in  scientific  language,  that  the  Christian 
religion— and  none  but  the  Christian  during  its  actual 
rise— possessed  from  the  first  a  Divine  Book ;  a  Canon  of 


§  34.]        CANONICAL    AUTHORITIES   OF   APOSTOLIC    A(iK         461 

absolute  sanctity;  for  without  this  fact  the  history  of  the 
New  Testament  Canon  would  be  incomprehensible.  It  was 
not  only  when  the  Books  of  the  New  Testament  were  written, 
or  when  they  were  gradually  collected  and  read  aloud  in  public, 
that  a  Canon  first  made  its  appearance  among  the  Christians. 
Jesus  himself  possessed  a  Bible,  as  did  all  the  Jews  of  his 
time,  and  his  Apostles  and  followers  throughout  the  world. 
It  is  immaterial  whether  the  names  *  Canon,'  '  Bible,'  '  Old 
Testament,'  were  in  existence  at  that  time  or  not ;  it  is 
equally  unimportant  whether  the  Bible  at  that  time  was  com- 
posed of  exactly  the  same  Books  as  those  included  in  the  Old 
Testament  of  to-day ;  but  at  any  rate  at  the  birth  of  Christianity 
there  had  existed  from  time  immemorial  in  the  conscious- 
ness of  every  Israelite — whether  of  '  the  Dispersion  '  or  of  the 
Holy  Land — a  number  of  writings  carrying  the  highest 
authority,  which  were  read  aloud  to  the  communities  on  the 
Sabbath  in  portions  of  some  length,  and  were  by  this  means 
universally  known.  These  writings  contained  the  infallible 
Revelation  of  God  to  His  people,  the  form  in  which,  even 
after  the  extinction  of  Prophecy,  He  Himself  had  remained, 
as  it  were,  personally  in  their  midst ;  they  were  held  sacred 
as  the  source  of  all  knowledge  concerning  the  Divine  Truth 
and  the  Divine  Will,  and  as  an  absolute  standard  for  every 
member  of  His  people. 

This  group  of  writings,  the  most  precious  inheritance  of  a 
greater  age,  had  been  brought  together  gradually.  We  can  still 
clearly  distinguish  three  strata  :  (1)  the  Law,  (2)  the  Prophets 
(nebiim)  and  (3)  the  Scriptures  (Hagiographa)  or  the  'other 
books  of  our  fathers '  which  are  mentioned  in  the  prologue 
to  the  Greek  Ecclesiasticus  (132  B.C.)  immediately  after  the 
Law  and  the  Prophets. 

When,  as  often  occurs  in  the  New  Testament,  and  even  in 
the  mouth  of  Jesus  in  Matt.  xxii.  40,  the  Book  of  the 
Eevelation  of  God  is  described  as  '  The  [whole]  Law  and  the 
Prophets,'  this  must  be  taken  as  a  designation  a  parte 
potiori,  for  no  one  believes  that  Jesus  had  any  idea  of 
excluding  the  Psalms  or  Job.  (Cf .  Luke  xxiv.  44,  '  the  law  of 
Moses,  and  prophets,  and  psalms  ' :  here  again  only  the  prin- 
cipal part,  the  crown  of  these  extra  '  Scriptures,'  is  named.) 


-r 

= 


462      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  I. 

More  briefly  still,  it  was  possible  to  speak  simply  of '  the  Law,' 1 
even  as  including  the  other  sacred  documents  also.  The 
simplest  name  is  that  most  generally  adopted — *  The  Scrip- 
tures.' The  addition  '  Holy '  is  rare,2  for  this  was  noi 
required  in  the  mental  intercourse  of  one  believer  wi1 
another.  The  singular,  '  The  Scripture,'  is  often  applied 
a  part,  or  even  a  single  passage  in  <  the  Scriptures,'  but  it 
may  also  serve  to  designate  the  whole,  and  this  was  the  more 
acceptable  as  it  emphasised  the  unity  of  that  complex 
collection  of  writings.  It  is  used  above  all  in  those  pi* 
where  the  written  revelation  of  God  is  personified,  as  in  tl 
phrase  '  the  Scripture  foretold  it '  and  *  the  Scripture  hal 
shut  up  all  things  under  sin.' 3 

Now  the  position  adopted  by  Jesus  with  regard  to  this 
Scripture  did  not  differ  from  that  of  his  Jewish  contemporaries. 
It  is  perfectly  fitting  that  Luke 4  should  make  him  start  from  a 
passage  of  the  Scripture  in  his  first  great  sermon  at  Nazareth 
— standing  up  to  read  as  reverently  as  any  other  man,  and 
sitting  down  again  before  he  begins  to  preach.  And  as  he 
began  his  task  of  teaching,  so,  after  his  resurrection,"' 
he  ended  it  by  initiating  his  disciples  into  the  meaning  of 
the  Scriptures,  thus  preventing  any  idea  of  discrepancy 
between  what  was  there  foretold,  and  what  was  now  fulfilled. 
Even  if  his  acknowledgment  of  every  jot  and  tittle  of  tl 
law 6  be  not  genuine,  it  is  at  least  indisputable  that  he  hi 
no  desire  whatever  to  criticise  the  sacred  things  of 
people.  Even  with  the  forcible  words  *  But  I  say  unto  you,' 
in  antithesis  to  *  Ye  have  heard  that  it  was  said  to  them  of  ok 
time,'  he  does  not  intend  to  discredit  or  to  undervalue  this 
« saying  '  of  former  days. 

For  our  part,  we  may  recognise  in  this  impressive  sign  of 
a  self-confidence  not  to  be  misled  by  the  mere  letter,  however 
sacred,  the  sublimity  of  the  New  Religion  as  compared 
with  the  Old — the  irreconcilable  contradiction  between  letter 
and  spirit ; — but  in  the  consciousness  of  Jesus  himself  there 


1  Horn.  iii.  1'J. 
3  Mark  xv.  28 : 
Gal.  iii.  8  and  22. 
<  Luke  iv.  16  fol. 
7  Matt.  v.  21-48. 


-  Horn.  i.  2 ;  2.  Tim.  iii.  15. 
John  vii.  38-42 ;  Rom.  iv.  3 ;  1.  Tim.  v.  18 ;  James  ii.  23 


Luke  xxiv.  44-47. 


Matt.  v.  17-19. 


§  34.]        CANONICAL   AUTHORITIES   OF   APOSTOLIC    AGE         463 

was  no  other  desire  than  that  of  setting  forth  the  whole  deep 
meaning  and  the  ultimate  purpose  of  the  commandments  of 
God,  in  opposition  to  a  conception  of  that  commandment 
which  was  merely  temporary,  superficial  and  external.  Jesus 
was  by  nature  too  unfettered,  too  creative,  to  make  use  of 
Old  Testament  words  as  much  as  Paul.  But  though  as  a 
fact  he  repeatedly  set  the  Law  at  naught  (e.g.  Mark  vii.  1-23 
and  x.  1-12)  with  all  the  authority  of  one  who  has  come  to  end 
it,  he  never  had  the  intention  of  quitting  the  basis  of  the 
Old  Testament.  In  principle  his  point  of  view  towards  the 
Scripture  was  the  same  as  that  of  every  Pharisee. 

2.  Nothing  was  further  from  the  mind  of  Jesus  than  the 
idea  of  enlarging  or  of  duplicating  these  Holy  Scriptures  ;  he 
neither  wrote  anything  himself,  nor  bequeathed  any  such  task 
to  his  disciples.  Nor  is  it  mere  chance  that  later  ages,  fruitful 
as  they  were  in  the  formation  of  legend,  never  ventured  to  credit 
Jesus  with  the  command  to  prepare  those  fictitious  Scriptures 
which  were  composed  under  the  name  of  every  possible 
Apostle.  When  he  called  his  disciples,  he  bade  them  work, 
like  himself,  by  word  of  mouth,  and  the  greater  number  of 
them  have  left  not  a  single  line  behind  ;  some  were  probably 
ignorant  of  the  art  of  writing.  They  had  the  Scriptures,  they 
had  the  Christ,  whose  speedy  return  they  confidently  expected  ; 
and  even  if  the  practical  tasks  of  the  moment  had  left  them 
time  for  authorship,  there  are  yet  no  grounds  for  supposing 
that  they  had  any  intention  of  writing,  far  less  of  writing 
books  which  should  rank  with  the  Law  and  the  Prophets. 
Paul  himself  had  no  idea  of  creating  a  new  sacred  literature  ; 
his  writings  were  all  occasional ;  in  his  Epistles  he  merely 
endeavoured  to  supply  for  the  moment  the  lack  of  his  own 
personal  presence  on  certain  definite  occasions.  It  did  not 
occur  to  him  to  demand  that  they  should  be  treasured  as  long 
as  the  world  endured,  that  they  should  be  dispersed  through 
the  rest  of  Christendom,  read  aloud  in  the  public  wor- 
ship of  other  communities — perhaps  even  of  those  of  which 
he  knew  nothing — or  placed  in  the  same  rank  as  the  Prophets 
and  the  Psalms.  In  Col.  iv.  16  he  desires  the  church  to  ex- 
change the  letter  written  to  it  for  that  which  he  had  sent  to 
the  neighbouring  church  of  Laodicea.  This  exhortation  shows 


464      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

that  such  a  forwarding  of  Paul's  letters  was  not  a  matter  of 
course,  and  even  here  it  is  only  enjoined  to  a  strictly  limited 
extent.  This  Epistle  to  Laodicea,  several  to  the  Corinthians, 
and  probably  many  more  of  which  no  trace  remains,  dis- 
appeared early :  an  inconceivable  occurrence  if  the  recipi- 
ents had  thought  that  they  held  Canonical  writings  in  their 
possession. 

The  Apostle  certainly  did  bring  a  Canon  to  the  heathen 
he  had  won ;  but  it  was  no  other  than  that  which  he  himself 
had  brought  with  him  from  Judaism.  '  The  Scriptures  '  were 
undoubtedly  read  aloud  in  the  Pauline  churches  as  they  were 
in  the  Jewish  Christian,  and  among  the  Jews  ;  for  the  Apostle 
always  takes  for  granted  a  considerable  acquaintance  with  the 
Old  Testament:  he  draws  from  it  innumerable  arguments 
for  his  demonstrations,1  which  are  as  binding  in  his  readers' 
eyes  as  in  his  own.  Beyond  these  he  knows  no  other 
written  authorities.  It  is  true  that  in  1.  Cor.  ii.  9,  words  are 
quoted  prefaced  by  '  As  it  is  written,'  and  in  Eph.  v.  14 
by  '  Wherefore  he  saith '  (that  is,  in  the  Scriptures),  which 
we  do  not  now  find  in  the  Old  Testament,  but  we  learn 
from  the  Fathers  that  such  passages  are  drawn  from  the 
Jewish  Apocrypha  (the  Apocalypse  of  Elias  and  others), 
which,  in  the  condition  of  the  Jewish  Canon  at  that  time,  the 
Apostle  might  have  treated  as  the  Word  of  God  no  less  than 
the  '  Wisdom  of  Solomon.'  And  if  by  the  '  Scriptures  of  the 
Prophets ' 2  through  which  the  great  mystery  had  been  made 
known  unto  all  nations,  Paul  meant  the  Apostolic  writings, 
including  the  Epistle  to  the  Komans,  none  of  his  readers 
would  have  understood  him,  precisely  because  of  that  addition 
*  of  the  Prophets.'  He  never  quotes  from'any  other  Epistle  of 
his,  nor  takes  for  granted  that  they  were  known  to  any  but 
those  to  whom  they  were  addressed ;  and  as  little  did  he 
appeal  to  the  written  teachings  of  any  fellow- Apostle, 
letters  reveal  a  strong  self-confidence ;  he  wishes  that  his 
warnings  and  exhortations  shall  have  a  lasting  effect ;  what 
he  writes  is  truth,  and  in  1.  Cor.,  after  strictly  distinguish  in-- 
between a  precept  that  emanates  from  himself  and  one  lai< 

1  In  Romans  alone  sixteen  times  KaOws  yfypairrat  or  yeyp.  yap. 
-  Rom.  xvi.  26.  •  1.  Cor.  vii.  10,  12. 


§34.]        CANONICAL    ACTIIOKITI KS    or    APOSTOLIC    AGE          465 

down  by  the  Lord,  and  after  clearly  characterising  the  proposed 
solution  of  moral  problems  as  a  simple  opinion  of  his  own 
(yvtopr),  vo/j,l£w]  he  closes  the  discussion  !  with  the  forcible 
expression  l  And  I  think  that  I  also  have  the  Spirit  of  God.' 
But  even  such  assertions  as  that  put  forward  in  vii.  25  in 
support  of  his  opinion,  '  I  give  my  judgment  as  one  that 
hath  obtained  mercy  of  the  Lord  to  be  a  believer  '  [TTKTTOS 
elsewhere  means  no  more  than  '  trustworthy  '  ],  show  plainly 
that  he  does  not  claim  an  extraordinary  authority  for  his 
Epistles.  In  his  estimation  they  rank  no  higher  than  any 
oral  declaration  ;  the  Spirit  of  God  to  which  he  appeals, 
belonged  to  all  Christians  alike  2 :  it  was  no  exclusive  posses- 
sion of  his  or  at  best  of  twelve  other  Apostles.  It  is  true  that 
the  Charismata,  the  Gifts  of  Grace,  in  which  this  possession 
of  the  Spirit  appeared  and  was  effectual,  were  bestowed  in 
manifold  degrees,  and  Paul  certainly  did  not  undervalue  his 
Apostolic,  his  Evangelistic  charisma  ;  but  although  he  very 
carefully  classifies  the  gifts  of  grace,3  he  nowhere  makes 
mention  of  any  charisma  of  authorship,  and  even  if  he  had, 
the  words  of  the  thirteenth  chapter  of  1.  Corinthians, '  For  now 
we  know  in  part,'  would  still  hold  good. 

In  short,  Paul  demands  from  those  churches  to  which  he 
had  given  the  Gospel — even  the  words  *  all  the  churches  '  of 
1.  Cor.  vii.  17  should  be  limited  in  this  way — a  pious  reception 
of,  and  obedience  to,  his  exhortations,  because  with  them 
he  feels  himself  as  a  father  among  his  children.4  But  he 
never  thought  of  making  similar  demands  upon  strange 
churches  (that  of  Jerusalem,  for  instance)  and,  conversely,  he 
repelled  such  claims  made  by  strange  Apostles  in  his  own 
Church.  He  has  no  knowledge  whatever  of  the  '  Choir  of  the 
Apostles  '  as  a  new  point  of  unity  for  the  whole  '  Universal 
Church,'  as  a  supreme  and  infallible  court  for  all.  We  must 
presume  the  same  standpoint  for  the  Primitive  Apostles  ;  in 
the  face  of  Gal.  i.  2  and  Acts  xxi.  17-26,  it  would  be  worse 
than  childish  to  believe  that  Christians  in  the  Holy  Land 
or  elsewhere  accepted  Paul's  Epistles  as  Divine  writings. 

But  what  if  the  Apocalypse  belongs  to  the  Apostolic  Age? 

1  1.  Cor.  vii.  40.  2  Bom.  viii.  14  fol. 

3  Bom.  xii.     1.  Cor.  xii.-xiv.  4  Gal.  iv.  19  ;  1.  Cor.  iv.  15. 

H  H 


166       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 


[CHAP.  i. 
It  is  cer- 


That  would  make  no  change  in  our  conclusions, 
tainly  written  in  a  solemn  and  lofty  style ;  its  author 
threatens  l  with  eternal  ruin  anyone  who  should  add  to  or 
take  away  from  '  the  words  of  the  book  of  this  prophecy.' 
Once  and  again  he  apostrophises  his  *  hearers,'  '2  showing  that 
he  expected  not  only  to  be  read,  but  to  be  read  in  public. 
But  he  shares  this  expectation  with  the  authors  of  every 
Jewish  Apocalypse ;  for  since  the  Apocalyptic  seer  renounces 
the  personal,  oral  effectiveness  of  the  prophet,  he  can  only 
gain  the  desired  influence  on  wider  circles  by  finding  readers 
for  his  '  Scripture  '  in  private  and  in  public.  Now  herein,  as 
he  knows  by  experience,  lay  that  danger  of  falsification  or 
mutilation  which  he  endeavours  to  avert  by  his  threats. 
He  wishes  not  to  be  rated  specially  high  as  a  writer,  but  as  a 
prophet  whom  God  had  permitted  to  look  into  great  mysteries 
(cf.  p.  279).  He  has  to  deliver  a  special  Eevelation  of  God 
to  his  servants,3  and  the  word  of  God 4  is  the  substance  of 
his  testimony.  Therefore  he  demands  for  it  the  same 
reverent  acknowledgement  as  each  of  the  hundred  prophets 
of  Corinth  demanded  for  their  discourses,  or  as  Paul  demanded 
for  his  own  utterances — unless  indeed  it  be  suggested  that  the 
falsification  of  his  Epistles  would  have  been  indifferent  to  him. 
But  he  can  scarcely  have  thought  of  the  addition  of  his  book  to 
the  '  Scriptures,'  in  any  case  not  more  than  did  the  authors, 
say,  of  the  Apocalypses  of  Enoch  or  of  Ezra.  Hernias  (a  simple 
Eoman  Christian  of  about  135)  is  no  less  concerned  in  later 
times  as  to  the  diffusion  of  his  Eevelation  of  the  '  Shepherd  ' ; 
he  even  asserts  that  he  had  received  instructions  from  heaven 
as  to  the  means  he  should  take  to  make  known  his  book  to 
'  all  the  Chosen ' ;  nevertheless,  he  did  not  consider  his 
visions,  exhortations,  and  parables  as  *  Holy  Scripture  '  in 
same  sense  as  Isaiah  and  the  Psalms.  The  writers  of 
velation/  and  Hernias  strive  their  utmost  to  secure  the 
desired  influence  over  their  contemporaries  ;  their  concern  is 
for  practical  success,  not  for  their  meed  of  honour.  The  idea 
of  placing  new  Canonical  books  side  by  side  with  those  which 
had  been  handed  down  from  former  ages,  was  absolutely  out 


1  Rev.  xxii.  is. 
3  Rev.  i.  1. 


*  Rev.  i.  3,  xxii.  18. 
4  Rev.  i.  2. 


$  :U.]         CANONICAL   AUTHORITIES   OF   APOSTOLIC   AGE         467 

keeping  with  the  Apostolic  times;  the  wealth  of  living  Canonical 
material — the  multitude  of  prophets,  of  speakers  with  tongues, 
of  teachers,  which  was  to  be  found  in  every  community,  did  not 
permit  the  consciousness  to  arise  of  any  need  for  a  new  Holy 
Scripture,  to  act,  as  it  were,  beside  the  great  prophetic  Books  of 
the  past  as  the  glad  interpreter  of  prophecy  fulfilled.  The 
creation  of  a  Canon  is  always  the  business  of  poorer  times  that 
wish  to  secure  something  at  least  from  the  riches  of  earlier  days, 
and  to  compensate  themselves  for  the  scantiness  of  their  pos- 
sessions by  exalting  their  dignity  to  the  highest  possible  degree. 

8.  And  yet  there  existed  even  in  the  oldest  Christian 
communities  an  authority  beside  the  Law  and  the  Prophets — 
nay,  placed  unconsciously  high  above  them— an  authority 
the  recognition  of  which  was  the  distinctive  mark  of  separa- 
tion from  the  unbelievers  who  revered  only  the  Law  and  the 
Prophets.  This  new  *  Canon '  was  Jesus  Christ. 

John  !  was  not  the  first  to  place  the  words  of  Jesus  simply 
on  a  level  with  the  words  of  God,  or  to  allot  to  the  Comforter 
the  task  of  bringing  all  that  Jesus  had  said  to  the  remembrance 
of   the  disciples.     Paul  himself  looked  upon  that  which  he 
had  received  from  '  the  Lord  ' 2  as  belonging  to  the  things 
beyond  which  there  was  no  appeal.     He  is  glad  to  be  able  to 
settle  a  doubt  concerning  the  resurrection  '  by  the  word  of  the 
Lord'3;  still  more  characteristic   is  1.  Cor.  vii.  10,  where 
an  ordinance  is  issued  with  the  words  '  not  I,  but  the  Lord  ' ; 
that  point  being  thereby   settled   at    once.     In  vv.    12  fol. 
he  brings  forward  his  personal  opinion,  and  this  requires  a 
detailed   argument;    in  ver.  25   he   states   regretfully    that 
*  concerning  virgins  he  has  no  commandment  of  the  Lord,' 
and  so  can  only  give  his  own  judgment.     Again,  in  1.  Cor. 
ix.  14 :  '  Even  so  did  the  Lord  ordain  that  they  which  pro- 
claim the  Gospel  should  live  of  the  Gospel ' — a  contravention 
of  this  commandment  on  the  part  of  believers  being  as  little  to 
be  thought  of  as  a  contradiction  of  the  sacred  words  of  Deut. 
xxv.  4,4  mentioned  in  ix.  9.     Some   such    words   of    Jesus 
must  certainly  have  formed  part  of  the  fixed  substance  of 
Paul's  preaching  of  the  New  Life,  and  if  his  account 5  of  the 

1  xiv.  1,  9,  10,  21,  24,  26.  2  1.  Cor.  xi.  23,  xv.  1  fol. 

3  1.  Thess.  iv.  15.  4  Cf.  Acts  xx.  35.        *  1.  Cor.  xi.  24  fol. 


H  H   2 


468      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  i. 

inauguration  of  the  Last  Supper,  especially  in  the  introductory 
formula,  sounds  as  if  he  were  dealing  with  expressions  which 
had  long  been  fixed  and  settled,  this  does  not  indicate  that  he 
is  here  quoting  a  written  record,  but  is  explained  most 
simply  by  the  fact  that  Paul  had  already  told  this  story  times 
without  number,  and  so  had  unconsciously  given  it  a  stereo- 
typed form — depending,  as  I  think,  upon  the  first  impressive 
report  of  it  which  had  been  given  to  him  in  Jerusalem.  In  any 
case  the  words  of  Jesus  (unhappily  so  few)  which  are  found 
in  Paul's  letters,  are,  for  him,  sacred  and  absolutely  binding, 
not  because  they  were  written  in  any  sacred  book,  but  because 
he  was  convinced  that  they  were  the  genuine  words  of  Jesus. 
He  never  quotes  such  words  with  any  of  the  forms  he  uses 
when  appealing  to  the  '  Scripture  ' :  it  is  purely  arbitrary 
to  attribute  to  Jesus  the  words  of  1.  Cor.  ii.  9  fol.,  and  of 
Eph.  v.  14  l ;  and  there  is  no  trace  of  Paul's  having  used 
any  primitive  Gospel,  or,  in  fact,  any  written  information 
whatever  concerning  Jesus.  The  (old)  Scripture  and  the 
Lord :  these  were  for  Paul  as  well  as  for  all  Christians 
his  time  the  infallible  sources  of  knowledge.  Yet  this  coi 
tained  the  germ  of  a  new  Scripture.  If  later  ages  would  no1 
see  their  Lord  pass  utterly  from  among  them,  they  could 
only  hold  him  fast  by  setting  his  words  on  record  ;  and  these 
records  of  him  could  not  fail  at  last  to  occupy  wholly  the  place 
which  had  been  his. 


§  35.  The  Canonical  Authorities  of  Christendom 
from  c.  70  to  c.  140 

[Almost  the  only  authorities,  besides  the  New  Testament,  are  the 
Apostolic  Fathers,  and  the  Teaching  of  the  Apostles  ('  Didache"  '). 
The  best  editions  of  the  Apostolic  Fathers  are :  '  Patrum  Apost. 
Opera  recensa,'  by  O.  von  Gebhardt,  A.  Harnack,  and  T.  Zahn  (3 
volume  edition  with  commentary,  1876-77 ;  editio  minor,  contain- 
ing the  text  only,  price  3  marks,  1900),  and  F.  X.  Funk's  '  Opera 
Patrum  Apost.'  vols.  i.  and  ii.  1887-91.  For  the  text  and  a  most 
thorough  discussion  of  the  '  Didach6,'  see  Harnack,  in  the  '  Texte 
und  Untersuchungen  zur  Geschichte  d.  altchristl.  Literatur,'  ii.  1, 
1886.] 

1  Bee  above,  p.  464. 


'fl/C 

5 

lOt 


§  3o.j       CANONICAL  AUTHORITIES    FROM  C.  70   TO    C.  140      469 

1.  A  large  part   of   the   New  Testament  writings  is  the 
work  of  the  two  generations  after  the  death  of  all  the  Apostles. 
On  one  point  there  is  no  change  from  the  earlier  position  : 
not   one  of    these    unknown   authors   intended   to   write   a 
Canonical   Scripture.      The   author   of    the   Epistle   to   the 
Hebrews  has  certain  readers  in  view  whom  he  knows  person- 
ally.    This  is  not  so  with  most  of  the  Catholic  Epistles.     The 
authors  of  these  address  their  utterance  to  the  whole  body 
of  believers ;  yet  this  implies  no  more  than  that  the  Epistle 
was  beginning  to  become  a  form  of  literature.     The  authors 
of   the  Epistles  ascribed  to  James  and   Peter  stand  on  the 
same  footing  as  the  authors  of  the  Gospels  and  the  Acts ; 
they  wish  to  serve  all  their  fellow-believers,  each  with  his 
particular  gift ;  but  not  one  of  them  is  conscious  of  a  special 
inspiration  which  sheds  the  glamour  of  divinity  around  his 
book.     Following  his  own  unconstrained  choice  (s&ogs  Kapol 
.  .  .  ypdilrai),  Luke,  in  his  Gospel,  '  traces  the  course  of  all 
things  accurately  from  the  first,' !  he  only  proposes  to  essay 
the  same  work  more  skilfully  than  the  *  many '  who  '  have 
taken  in  hand  to  draw  up  a  narrative ; '  not  to  do  it  under 
entirely  different  conditions.     John  also  contains  a  confession 
of   imperfection   in    xx.    30   fol.    (cf.   xxi.    25) ;    the   author 
breaks   off  at  this  point,  not  because  God's  assistance  had 
failed  him,  but  because  he  is  moved  by  entirely  human  con- 
siderations  of   what   is    appropriate    and   fitting.     If   these 
writings  had   not  come   down  to   us   as   parts   of  the  New 
Testament,  no  one  would  be  aware  from  any  self -conscious- 
ness on  the  part  of  the  authors,  that  there  was  any  difference 
between  these  books  and  other   uncanonical  productions  of 
the  Christian  literature  of  those  times. 

2.  On   the  other  hand,  Paul  and  these  later  writers,  to 
whatever  section  of  the  Church  they  belong,  are  at  one  in 
making   '  The    Scriptures  and  the  Lord  '  the  foundation  of 
belief  and  life.      2.  Timothy  iii.  16  speaks  of  the  Scripture 
delivered  by  God  (ypa(f)r)  dsoirvsvcrros)  and  extols  the  blessing 
to  be  found  in  a  careful  study  of  it.     Here  the  word  '  Scrip- 
ture,' no  less  certainly  than  in  2.  Peter  i.  20  fol.,  means  the 
ancient  Holy  Scripture  given  by  God  to  Israel. 

1  Luke  i.  1-4. 


470      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO 


FAMENT      [CHAP. 


Christians  with  Hellenic  culture  considered  it  indispen- 
sable to  steep  themselves  in  the  thoughts  of  Jewish  men  of 
God  ;  almost  all  Christian  authors  of  the  first  century  show 
themselves  remarkably  familiar  with  the  Old  Testament, 
although  in  truth  their  comprehension  of  it  was  not  always 
made  easy  by  the  universally  received  Greek  translation  of 
the  '  Seventy  '  (i.e.  the  Septuagint).  A  new  Scripture  science 
arises  :  the  art  of  interpreting  the  '  Scriptures  '  in  a  Christian 
sense,  and  of  drawing  from  them  authority  for  each  idea 
and  each  precept  of  the  new  religion.  When  Poly  carp  in  his 
letter  to  the  Philippians  (xii.  1)  confidently  expresses  the  hope 
that  his  readers  are  well  versed  in  the  Holy  Scriptures,  he  han 
this  science  in  mind,  and  the  Gentile  Christians  in  Corinth 
or  Kome  were  probably  as  well  acquainted  with  the  Old 
Testament  as  was  the  average  Jew.  But  for  Christians  the 
*  commandment  of  the  Lord  and  Saviour  '  (rj  svro\rj  rov 
Kvpiov)  took  its  place  beside  '  the  words  which  were  spoken 
before  by  the  holy  prophets,' l  while  as  regards  the  employment 
of  these  words  for  purposes  of  teaching  or  admonition,  there 
is  an  unmistakable  advance  from  Paul  to  the  writers  of  the 
two  following  generations — the  Apostolic  Fathers,  the  authors 
of  the  1st  Epistle  of  Clement  and  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas, 
Ignatius,  Hernias,  even  the  authors  of  the  '  Didache  '  (c.  130), 
and  of  2.  Peter  and  James.  Not  in  vain,  not  without 
response  to  a  need  universally  felt,  did  the  t  many  '  mention 
by  Luke  2  strive  to  keep  the  tradition  of  eye-witnesses  concer 
ing  the  Bringer  of  the  Gospel  from  perishing,  and  to  sha 
it  into  a  clear  and  complete  historical  narrative.  In  these 
words  of  the  Lord  the  Church  found  her  most  direct  edifica- 
tion, her  most  infallible  guide.  Naturally,  the  farther  we  go 
from  the  Primitive  Church,  the  more  complete  is  the  kno 
ledge  of  the  sayings  of  Jesus  obtained  from  written  sources 
that  is  to  say,  it  is  drawn  from  the  historical  works  of  t 
'  many,'  but  there  is  still  a  distinction  made  between  t 
fountain  head  and  the  waters  which  flow  from  it ;  a  word  is 
not  sacred  because  it  stands  in  one  or  another  Gospel,  but 
because  it  comes  from  the  mouth  of  Jesus,  or  teaches  us  to 
know  Jesus,  or  spreads  the  faith  of  Christ.  The  Gospels  were 

1  2.  Peter  iii.  2.  2  Luke  i.  1. 


I 


$  35.]      CANONICAL    AUTHORITIES  FROM  C.  TO  TO  C.  140         471 

treasured  as  a  substitute  for  oral  instruction,  just  as  a  church 
would  treasure  a  letter  of  its  Apostle  as  a  substitute  for 
his  personal  exhortation,  for  the  time  unattainable.  They 
were  not  considered  as  records  of  revelation,  and  their  authors 
were  not  looked  on  as  prophets,  men  impelled  by  the  Holy 
Ghost,  working  with  the  peculiar  help  of  God  and  under  his 
special  supervision,  but  as  trustworthy  fellow-believers  bear- 
ing witness  to  the  Gospel.  The  freedom  with  which  any 
Gospel  material  is  quoted — and  how  many  words  of  Jesus, 
since  lost,  must  then  have  been  in  circulation  ! — is  in  charac- 
teristic contrast  to  the  growing  accuracy  in  Old  Testament 
quotations.  No  question  as  yet  exists  of  ranking  the  *  Gospels,' 
all  or  any  of  them,  with  the  Holy  Scriptures. 

In  the  so-called  Epistle  of  Barnabas  (about  125  A.D.) 
a  saying  of  Jesus,  elsewhere  unattested,  is  introduced  with 
the  form  <f>7jcriv,1  which  the  author  uses  elsewhere  for  the 
words  of  Scripture,2  but  Jesus  had  been  named  in  the 
foregoing  clause,  and  it  is  the  most  natural  course  to  take 
him  simply  as  the  subject  of  this  '  he  says.'  But  Barnabas  3 
certainly  introduces  the  sentence  '  Many  are  called  but  few 
chosen '  by  the  words  '  as  it  is  written,'  and  according  to 
Matthew  xxii.  14,  this  saying  came  from  the  mouth  of 
Jesus.  But  the  conclusion  that  Barnabas  looked  upon 
our  First  Gospel  as  '  Scripture '  would  be  premature,  con- 
sidering how  much  evidence  there  is  against  it.  The 
saying,  which  does  not  bear  a  specifically  Christian  stamp, 
may  very  well  come  from  some  Old  Testament  Apocryphon, 
as  does  that  of  1.  Cor.  ii.  9,  unless  indeed  the  author's  me- 
mory has  failed  him,  as  sometimes  happens  to  greater  men 
than  Barnabas.  The  first  who  undoubtedly  designates  as 
'  Scripture '  a  collection  of  the  Lord's  Sayings — of  what  col- 
lection he  was  speaking,  or  whether  of  any  particular  one, 
cannot  be  determined — and  consciously  places  their  authority 
beside  that  of  the  ancient  Scriptures,  is  the  writer  of  a  homily 
which  has  received  the  misleading  name  of  the  Second  Epistle 
of  Clement.  He  is  evidently  not  accustomed  to  distinguish 
the  God  who  speaks  in  the  Old  Testament  from  the  '  Lord  ' 

1  vii.  11.  -  E.g.,  vii.  7.  3  iv.  14. . 


472      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP. 

of  the  Christians  (e.g.,  iii.  5,  \syst,  Bs  /cal  ev  ra>  'HoWa,  i.< 
the  same  Bedeemer  who  speaks  in  Matt.  x.  32),  and  after 
has  quoted  a  sentence  of  Isaiah  in  ii.  1-3  and  explained  it 
detail,  he  passes  on  in  §  iv.  to  Matt.  ix.  13,  *  I  came  not,  etc. 
with  the  formula  '  and  again  another  Scripture  saith ' 
vpafyrj).  If  this  is  read  with  vi.  8,  for  instance,  'But  the 
Scripture  says  also  in  Ezekiel,'  it  is  impossible  not  to  recog- 
nise the  fact  that  here  the  utterances  of  the  Christian  spirit 
have  received  a  part  in  the  lofty  position  claimed  for  the  old 
records  of  Kevelation.  But  the  unknown  preacher  certainly 
belongs  to  a  time  which  is  beyond  the  limits  set  here  (perhaps 
c.  145),  and  he  has  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  Clement  the 
Apostolic  Father,  who  died  about  the  year  97. 

3.  Yet  the  Canon  of  the  two  generations  of  Christians  whk 
followed  Paul  was  certainly  somewhat  more  extensive  than  his 
had  been.  Not  only  did  men  feel  sure  of '  the  Scripture  and  the 
Lord,'  they  possessed  besides — so  the  foundations  broadened 
— a  third  authority  in  the  Apostles.  Paul  had  already  found 
the  Apostles  enjoying  the  highest  consideration  in  the  Primi- 
tive Community.1  In  Galatians  ii.  he  speaks  of  them  as 
'  they  who  were  of  repute,' 2  and  he  thinks  it  of  the  highest 
importance  to  be  placed  on  an  equality  with  them,  even  in 
1.  Cor.  xv.  9  ;  nor  is  it  by  chance  that  he  lays  such  stress  01 
the  d7r6(7To\os  'Irjo-ov  Xpiarov  beside  the  TlavXos  in  the  su] 
scriptions  to  his  letters.  That  he  uses  this  word  also  in 
wider  sense  only  shows  that  the  name  was  associated  witl 
the  specific  idea  of  a  messenger,  an  envoy ;  Gal.  ii.  7  and 
show  most  clearly  that  the  aTroVroXot  /car'  s^o-^v  were  those 
whom  the  Lord  had  appointed,  and  to  whom  the  greatest 
charge,  the  Gospel,  had  been  entrusted.  To  reject  th< 
meant  to  reject  the  Lord  ;  to  contradict  them  was  to  contradict 
the  Gospel ;  they  were  the  authentic  interpreters  of  the  per- 
fect Eevelation  of  God  in  Christ.  This  conclusion  necessaril 
followed  from  the  premises  recognised  even  by  Paul,  but  he 
did  not  draw  it  himself,  because  he  was  forced  in  conscience 

1  Gal.  i.  17. 

2  Vv.  2,  6%  01  SoKovvrts,  with  the  additions  tlval  n  in  6*,  and  <rrv\oi  efj/cu, 
'they  who  were   reputed  to  be  pillars,'  in  9  (i.e.,  a   narrower   circle   within 
the  Twelve). 


ct 

• 


§  35.]     CANONICAL   AUTHORITIES    FROM    C.    70   TO    C.    140     473 

to  '  resist '  even  the  Apostles  ]  ;  because  as  far  as  his  conscious- 
ness reached,  the  unity  in  the  circle  of  the  Apostles,  of  whom 
he  counted  himself  one,  was  not  perfectly  established,  and  a 
canon  without  unity,  a  supreme  authority  divided  against 
itself,  was  a  monstrosity.  His  bitterest  experiences  sharpened 
his  sight  for  the  human  weakness  even  of  the  Apostles  ;  and 
so  he  comes  to  place  the  possession  of  Love  even  higher  than 
the  possession  of  the  Apostolate.2  The  Apostles,  in  his  opinion, 
were  invested  with  the  most  important  office  in  the  new 
Church  of  God,-"  but  close  behind  them  he  ranks  the  Chris- 
tian Prophets,  who,  in  noticeably  close  connection  with  the 
Apostles,  are  extolled  in  Eph.  ii.  20  and  iii.  5  as  forming, 
equally  with  the  Apostles,  the  foundation  of  the  new  building 
— as  the  inspired  recipients  of  the  final  revelation. 

Even  in  the  purely  Jewish  Christian  communities  of 
Palestine,  especially  in  Jerusalem,  the  authority  of  the  Apostles 
in  their  lifetime  can  scarcely  have  been  unlimited  ;  the 
difference  in  spiritual  f ruitfulness  and  religious  power  between 
individual  Apostles  made  itself  too  strongly  felt,  and,  even  if  we 
except  Paul,  perfect  unanimity  among  them  was  not  always  the 
rule.4  The  15th  chapter  of  Acts,  and  still  more  vv.  xxi.  17-25, 
unconsciously  teach  us,  in  spite  of  the  strong  colouring  from 
later  conceptions  with  which  they  are  overlaid,  that  there 
could  be  no  question  whatever  of  the  autocracy  of  the  Apostles 
even  in  the  Primitive  Community.  Later  generations  were  no 
longer  confronted  with  the  difficulties  which  hindered  the 
contemporaries  of  the  Apostles  from  conceding  to  them 
the  high  position  logically  consequent  on  the  relation  in 
which  they  stood  to  the  Lord  and  the  Gospel.  From  a 
distance  no  dark  side  appeared  in  the  picture ;  the  world 
remembered  gratefully  that  it  was  indebted  to  them  for 
faith  and  for  sure  knowledge  ;  they  were  the  nearest  link  in  the 
golden  chain  by  which  men  felt  themselves  bound  to  heaven. 
They  were  the  mediators  between  the  Dispenser  of  Salvation 
and  those  who  enjoyed  it ;  in  order  to  believe  in  salvation 
mankind  must  trust  them  unconditionally :  that  is,  it  must 
regard  them  as  a  canonical  authority. 

1  Gal.  ii.  11.  3  1.  Cor.  xii.  28— xiii.  13. 

8  1.  Cor.  xii.  28  ;  Eph.  iv.  11.  4  Gal.  ii.  12. 


474      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

This,  then,  is  what  actually  occurs  in  all  the  writings  of  the 
post-Apostolic  period.  Though  the  name  *  Apostle '  is  seldom 
used  in  the  Gospels,  though  the  want  of  understanding  and  the 
weaknesses  of  the  Twelve '  are  mentioned  without  reserve,  this 
is  all  intended  but  to  arouse  wonder  at  the  result — namely, 
the  greatness  they  attained  under  the  instruction  of  Jesus. 
Practically  everything  is  said  with  Mark  iv.  11  :  '  Unto  you  is 
given  the  mystery  of  the  kingdom  of  God.'  The  concluding 
scene  in  Matthew  xxviii.  16-20  is  scarcely  needed  ;  in  it  the 
risen  Christ,  now  in  possession  of  all  authority  in  heaven  and 
upon  earth,  commissions  them  to  be  the  teachers  of  his  com- 
mandments among  all  the  nations,  and  promises  to  be  '  with 
them  alway,  even  unto  the  end  of  the  world.'  Thus,  where 
the  Apostles  are,  there  is  the  Lord.  The  phrase  of  Sera- 
pion  (c.  200),  'We  accept  the  Apostles  as  we  do  the  Lord,' 
might  have  been  spoken  a  hundred  years  earlier  ;  in  the 
Apostles  was  embodied  all  truth.  The  Apostles  alone,  the 
Twelve  (no  longer  they  and  the  Prophets)  become  the  foun- 
dation stones  of  the  walls  of  the  Holy  City.^  According 
to  the  Acts,3  the  decisions  (Soyfjuara)  of  the  Apostles  are 
issued  as  under  the  authority  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  and  so 
are  naturally  binding  on  every  Christian  community ;  to  the 
Apostles  is  reserved,  as  it  were,  the  Word  of  God  l  ;  they 
ordain  the  newly  chosen  officials  of  the  Church,5  they  hold 
in  their  hands  the  general  direction  of  the  new  religious 
society,  and  the  idealising  history  of  *  Luke  '  can  no  longer 
conceive  a  difference  of  opinion  among  the  Apostles.  The 
simple  fact  that  anyone  should  have  continued  his  Gospel  by 
writing  an  *  Acts  of  the  Apostles,'  that  under  the  collective 
description  *  those  things  which  have  been  fulfilled  among  us,' 
Luke  thus  early,  perhaps,  includes  both  Acts  of  Jesus  and  Acts 
of  the  Apostles,  best  shows  the  light  in  which  the  Apostles 
were  regarded  in  his  age.  Naturally,  everything  which  had 
any  significance  among  Christian  circles  in  matters  of  teach- 
ing and  life,  of  discipline  or  the  usages  of  public  worship, 
was  now  traced  back  to  the  Apostles  ;  the  word  '  Apostolic ' 


1  Cf.  also  Barn.  v.  9. 

3  Acts  xvi.  4  (xv.  23-29). 

s  Acts  vi.  6  ;  cf.  1.  Clem,  xlii.-xliv. 


1  Rev.  xxi.  14. 
4  Acts  vi.  2. 


§  35.]      CANONICAL    AUTHORITIES   FROM  C.  70  TO  C.  140         475 

became  a  synonym  for  '  ecclesiastically  correct,'  and  whatever 
men  wished  to  establish  as  truly  Christian  was  handed  or 
written  down,  in  good  faith,  as  the  rule  or  doctrine  of  the 
Apostles.  Thus  in  2.  Peter  iii.  2  the  command  of  the  Lord 
and  Saviour  is  described  expressly  as  being  vouched  for  by 
'  your  Apostles.' l  God,  Christ,  the  Apostles  :  Clement 2  con- 
sidered these  degrees  as  no  less  complete  than  universally 
recognised  (6  Xpto-ros  ovv  CLTTO  rov  Osov  teal  01  airoaroXoi  airo 
rov  Xpio-rov — both,  consequently,  springing  in  their  order 
from  the  will  of  God),  and  the  Divinity  of  Apostolic  institu- 
tions was  thus  proved. 

Polycarp  (t  155)  exhorts :]  us  to  serve  Christ,  first  as  ordained 
by  Christ  himself,  secondly  by  the  Apostles,  and  thirdly  by  the 
Prophets  (here  equivalent  to  the  Old  Testament) .  In  the  seven 
Epistles  of  Ignatius,  which  were  written  before  the  Epistle  of 
Polycarp,  probably  about  115,  the  author  is  particularly  fond 
of  appealing  to  the  Apostles  as  an  incontrovertible  authority. 
For  instance,  according  to  Ignatius,  the  Lord  acts  either 
through  himself  or  through  his  Apostles,4  and  in  either  case 
'  not  without  the  Father.'  The  Magnesians  should  strive  to  be 
confirmed  in  the  '  dogmas  '  of  the  Lord  and  the  Apostles.1 
And  according  to  2.  Clem.  xiv.  2,  Christian  readers  knew  that 
the  supermundane  quality  of  the  Church  was  attested  by  the 
Books  and  the  Apostles  (ra  j3i/3\ia  KOI  ol  aTroo-roXot),  this 
very  passage  showing  that  'the  Apostles'  were  not  to  be 
found  in  books.  Single  sentences  of  the  Apostles  are  never 
quoted — before  Polycarp,  that  is  ;  much  less  are  their  let- 
ters treated  as  '  Scriptures  ' ;  the  desire  to  know  how  the 
Apostles  had  manifested  themselves  did  not  exist.  The 
Church  of  about  the  year  100  felt  that  the  canonical  nature 
of  her  ordinances,  her  organisation,  was  vouched  for  by 
the  Apostles,  just  as  that  of  her  ideas  and  her  principles 
was  vouched  for  by  the  '  Words  of  the  Lord  ' ;  for  the  Apostles 
had  founded  every  community  on  the  Gospel,  and  organised 
it  in  conformity  with  the  Gospel.  The  idea  which  was  to 
become  so  familiar,  that  the  genuineness  and  truth  of 

1  Of.  the  title  of  the  AtSax??  xvplov  Sib.  TU>V  5ci5t/fo  a.iro(Tr6\wi>. 

*  1  Clem.  xlii.  1  fol.  3  vi.  3.  4  Ad  Magn.  vii.  1. 

5  Ibid.  xiii.  1. 


476      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

the  traditions  about  Christ  could  only  be  guaranteed  by  the 
Apostles  as  eye-  and  ear-witnesses,  did  not  once  find  expres- 
sion in  the  time  of  which  we  are  speaking  ;  such  witnesses  still 
existed  in  considerable  numbers,  and  men  had  not  yet  become 
suspicious.  In  the  thought  of  that  period  '  the  Apostles  ' 
were  &  purely  ideal  Canon,  impalpable  and  uncontrollable,  and 
therefore,  in  the  event  of  differences,  equally  to  be  appealed 
to  by  both  parties  ;  they  were  but  the  expression  of  the 
strong  conviction  that  after  the  ascension  of  Jesus  men  had 
ceased  to  become  dependent  for  life  and  teaching  on  human 
volition  alone,  but  committed  everything  to  the  decision  of 
the  highly  favoured  possessors  of  the  Spirit  of  God,  the  called 
and  chosen  weapons  of  Jesus  Christ ;  and  that,  further,  the 
foundation  and  organisation  of  the  great  Gentile  churches, 
which  could  not  be  referred  to  '  the  Lord,'  had  taken  place 
under  the  direction  of  infallible  authority.  Certainly  this 
conviction  could  not  be  so  universally  maintained  in  the 
face  of  violent  attacks  from  without,  or  of  differences  of 
opinion  on  fundamental  questions  within  the  communities  ; 
soon  there  could  only  be  a  written  source  from  which  to  draw 
decisions  as  to  what  was  Apostolic  or  non-Apostolic  ;  if  the 
Apostles  were  not  to  fade  from  sight  altogether,  some  tangible 
sign  of  them  must  be  forthcoming  and  must  be  handled  in  a 
manner  worthy  of  them.  Thus  through  this  Canon,  '  the 
Apostles,'  a  fresh  movement  was  begun  which  was  bound  to 
end  in  the  establishment  of  a  strictly  circumscribed  circle  of 
Apostolic  writings  and  precepts. 


>/  the 


§  36.  The  Preparatory  Stages  in  the  Canonisation  q 
New  Testament  Scriptures 

1.  A  gradual  process  made  the  Books  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment the  most  sacred  writings  of  Christendom.  They  did  not 
attain  this  position  immediately  upon  their  outward  comple- 
tion ;  but  it  would  be  equally  untrue  to  suppose  that  on  a 
given  day  the  decision  of  a  majority  in  the  Synod  transformed 
them  from  ordinary  books  into  Divine  Records.  The  New 
Testament  Canon  is  the  result  of  a  long-continued  process, 
the  first  phases  of  which  we  have  to  reconstruct  by  hypothesis, 


§  36.]  PREPARATORY  STACKS  IN  CANONISATION  OF  N.  TEST.  477 

since  direct  testimony  from  such  distant  antiquity  is  not  forth- 
coming. One  thing  is  certain  :  before  a  book  was  canonised,  it 
must  have  been  tenderly  and  highly  prized.  And,  moreover, 
this  love  and  high  esteem  must  have  been  very  widely  spread 
if  canonisation  not  only  aroused  no  opposition,  but  was  nowhere 
considered  as  an  innovation.  Such  a  frame  of  mind,  again,  was 
the  natural  result  of  a  close  acquaintance  with  the  books  con- 
cerned, and  must  have  been  produced  in  an  extraordinary  degree 
in  the  decades  before  140.  Now,  a  knowledge  of  the  contents 
of  Christian  books  could  only  be  obtained  by  the  lower  strata  in 
the  early  Christian  communities  through  public  reading  in  the 
services  of  the  Church.  A  large  proportion  of  the  believers 
consisted  everywhere  of  hardworking  slaves  and  illiterates, 
who  could  only  get  Christian  knowledge  and  edification  from 
these  services  in  the  churches.  The  '  many  '  who  before  100  A.D. 
had  attempted  to  write  the  history  of  the  '  fulfilment,'  cer- 
tainly did  not  wish  to  write  for  the  cultured  few  among  their 
fellow-Christians,  who  were  precisely  those  least  in  need  of  such 
books.  Their  first  object  was,  not  to  win  new  converts,  not  even 
solely  to  provide  assistance  for  the  Christian '  teachers,  the 
orators  of  the  congregations,  towards  using  whatever  portions 
they  pleased  from  among  the  materials  thus  arranged  to  suit 
their  choice ;  they  addressed  themselves  to  all  believers  :  they 
counted  on  being  read  publicly  in  every  sphere  accessible  to 
them.  The  extent  of  these  spheres,  and  the  places  where  their 
desire  was  fulfilled,  were  matters  of  chance.  Well-merited 
oblivion  soon  fell  to  the  lot  of  much  of  this  literature  ;  large  and 
favourably  situated  churches  would  very  soon  have  possessed 
many  of  these  historical  books,  and  have  used  them  in  turns  for 
their  edification  ;  others  again  would  have  been  content  with  a 
single  Gospel ;  but  it  is  hardly  likely  that  at  about  140  there 
were  any  Christian  communities  which  used  no  written  records 
of  the  words  and  deeds  of  the  Lord,  or  found  the  prophecies 
of  the  Old  Testament  and  the  addresses  of  their  teachers  suffi- 
cient for  their  edification,  considering  how  little  those  teachers 
were  in  a  position  to  paint  the  Lord  for  them  in  living  colours. 
The  Apocalypse  purported  to  convey  a  message  from 
Heaven  to  Christendom — to  the  Christians  of  Asia  in  the  first 
instance  ;  among  these,  then,  it  was  naturally  read  aloud  with 


478      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  I. 

reverence,  but  no  one  dreamed  of  throwing  it  aside  after  a 
single  reading  ;  it  was  constantly  introduced  anew  into  the 
services  of  the  Church,  whenever  the  need  was  felt  of  joining 
in  its  cry  of  longing,  '  Come,  Lord  Jesus,'  or  of  receiving  the 
comforting  assurance  '  Yea  :  I  come  quickly.'  l     And  when 
should  this  need  have  disappeared,  seeing  that  the  fulfilment 
was  still  delayed  ?     Even  if  the  Apocalypse  was,  in  the  first 
instance,  read  aloud  only  in  the  Asiatic  communities,  its  intro- 
duction into  other  provinces  would  have  come  about  quite 
naturally,  say,  when  foreign  brethren,  on  their  visits  to  Ephesus 
or    Smyrna,    experienced  for   the   first   time  the  passionate 
emotions  called  forth  by  the  words  of  this  book ;  they  took  it 
back  with  them  to  their  homes,  and  wherever  there  was  a  taste 
for  these  ideas  and  the  forms  in  which  they  were  clothed,  the 
Elders  received  the  new  gift  gratefully,  and  made  the  whole 
community  acquainted  with  the  *  Eevelation.'     I  do  not  wish 
to  maintain   that  there  was  a  regular,  set  reading   of  any 
Christian  book  in  the  Church  services  ;  when,  in  what  order 
and  in  what  portions  the  edifying  literature  of  the  Christians 
was  read  aloud,  was  a  matter  solely  dependent  on  those  who 
conducted  the  services.     It  is  impossible  to  over-estimate  the 
variety  of  custom  in   this  respect ;    rules   and   laws  on  the 
subject  existed  nowhere,  much  less  a  well-organised  system  of 
pericopae  for  reading  in  the  churches.     The  important  point, 
however,  is  that  in  post-Apostolic   times   the  churches  did 
become  accustomed  to  make  use  of  writings  of  Christian  origin, 
together  with  the  old  sacred  books  of  Israel,  for  their  common 
edification.     And  among  such  writings,  beside  many  which  dis- 
appeared later,  and  beside  the  Four  Gospels  and  the  Acts,  which 
remained  for  all  time,  letters  of  the  Apostles  were  early  included. 
Paul's  Epistles  to  the  churches  were  intended  to  be  read 
aloud  to  those  to  whom  they  were  addressed  ;  but  it  would 
have  been  unnatural  for  a  church  which  felt  a  strong  love  for 
its   founder  to    have    ignored   his   writings    after  a  single 
reading.     At  those  times,  above  all,  in  which  his  absence  was 
specially  felt,  or  when  perhaps  difficulties  like  those  he  had 
once  treated   had  occurred   again,  men  would  turn  eagerly 
to  the  letters  from  his  beloved  hand  ;  when  once  they 

1  Rev.  xxii.  20. 


§  36.]  PREPARATORY  STAGES  IN  CANONISATION  OF  N.  TEST.  479 

felt  how  he  lived  again  in  those  letters,  what  power  emanated 
from  such  and  such  a  passage,  they  would  naturally  determine 
to  ensure  such  enjoyment  to  themselves  more  frequently  in  the 
future,  and  to  draw  goodly  profit  from  this  precious  inheritance 
of  their  spiritual  father.  Soon,  too,  there  would  arise  an  ex- 
change of  possessions  between  communities  which  had 
friendly  intercourse  one  with  another  :  the  Philippians  would 
gratefully  read  the  Epistles  to  their  neighbours  in  Thessalonica 
side  by  side  with  their  own  Epistle,  and  so  on  ;  communities 
which  themselves  possessed  nothing  of  the  kind  would  address 
themselves  to  the  more  favoured  towns.  Presently  there  would 
appear  no  reason  why  Paul's  Epistles  alone  should  be  thus 
honoured  ;  they  were  read,  not  because  the  writer  bore  a  high 
title,  but  because  they  were  found  to  be  edifying  ;  if  other 
communities  held  similar  writings  from  their  spiritual 
fathers  or  prominent  teachers,  such  as  Apollos  or  Barnabas, 
they  would  read  and  pass  these  on  also  with  joy.  It 
goes  without  saying  that  Paul's  letters  were  entirely  dis- 
regarded in  the  districts  won  by  the  false  apostles  who  had 
so  often  made  his  life  a  burden  to  him  ;  but  apart  from  the 
fact  that  the  terrible  disturbances  of  the  Jewish  wars  must, 
after  66,  have  considerably  limited  the  productivity  and  love 
of  agitation  of  the  anti-Pauline  movement ;  apart,  too,  from 
the  fact  that  the  death  of  '  those  of  repute '  could  not  fail  to 
exercise  an  influence  towards  mutual  reconciliation— since,  as 
appears  from  2.  Cor.  x.-xiii.,  the  bitterness  of  the  strife  was  due 
to  personal  animosity  rather  than  to  material  differences — the 
triumphant  success  of  Paulinism  must  soon  have  silenced  the 
Judaising  opposition.  The  Gentile  Christian  element  in  the 
churches  alone  showed  steady  growth  :  of  the  Jews  but  a  few 
individuals  still  found  a  bridge  to  lead  them  to  the  faith.  The 
younger  followers  of  Paul,  who,  unlike  their  master,  had  not 
begun  by  shaking  off  the  yoke  of  Judaism,  held  language  that 
was  in  no  sense  anti-Jewish,  or  calculated  to  wound  Jewish 
susceptibilities,  and  former  adversaries  met  in  peace  on  the 
common  ground  of  growing  Catholicism.  Ancient  antipathies 
to  Paul  were  referred  to  a  misunderstanding,1  the  more  credible 
by  reason  of  the  bitter  complaints  made  by  the  brethren  of  the 

1  1.  Peter  iii.  1C. 


480       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT       [CHAP.  i. 

Pauline  churches  at  this  time,  about  the  misinterpretation 
which  the  Apostle's  letters  suffered  through  the  madness  of  the 
Gnostics.  A  small  and  irreconcilable  minority,  holding  beyond 
the  reach  of  argument  that  fidelity  to  the  Law  in  the  Pharisaic 
sense  was  the  consummation  of  righteousness,  had  voluntarily 
withdrawn  from  public  life  and  from  connection  with  the 
'  Church.'  Pauline  Epistles  were  probably  admitted  for  public 
reading  in  Jerusalem  and  Joppa  even  before  140,  as  was  the 
Apocalypse,  despite  its  Jewish  tone,  in  Corinth,  Smyrna  and 
Eome. 

But  *  Anagnosis  '  of  this  sort,  as  applied  to  a  group  of  Chris- 
tian writings  which  was  at  first  constantly  increasing,  must  be 
clearly  distinguished  from  embodiment  in  a  Canon.  That 
such  an  Anagnosis  took  place  is  indisputable,  because  the 
Apostolic  Fathers  are  familiar  with  sayings  of  the  Lord  which, 
from  their  form,  clearly  betray  their  dependence  on  written 
sources  like  our  Gospels,  and  also  because  their  acquaintance 
with  Pauline  Epistles  is  undeniable  ' ;  but  that  a  Canon  was 
formed  we  cannot  believe,  because  the  way  in  which  those 
documents  were  used  teaches  us  too  plainly  how  little  the  New 
was  considered  equal  to  the  Old.  True  that  when  the  reading 
aloud  of  Christian  writings  beside  the  Old  Testament  Scrip- 
tures first  became  the  rule  and  was  felt  to  be  indispensable, 
it  must  have  tended  very  much  to  efface  the  distinction  ;  but 
the  admission  of  a  document  to  public  reading  in  the  worship 
of  the  Church  implies  nothing  more  in  itself  than  that  it  was 
held  to  be  edifying  and  useful  to  the  community.  The 
scruples  of  certain  branches  of  Protestantism  were  unknown 
to  the  early,  and  especially  to  the  earliest,  Church.  The 
correspondence  between  the  churches  or  between  their  bishops, 
including  purely  business  communications,  was  read  out  in 
the  course  of  the  service,  as  were  the  Acts  of  the  Martyrs 
and  the  Lives  of  the  Saints.  Even  in  the  fourth  and  fifth 
centuries  it  was  ordained  in  individual  provincial  churches 
that  anti-heretical  writings  should  be  read  aloud  on  Sundays 
to  the  congregations,  so  as  to  arm  the  brethren  everywhere 
against  the  factious  and  seductive  arts  of  the  heretics.  But 
no  one  looked  on  these  controversial  writings  as  Canonical 
on  that  account. 

1  1.  Clem,  xlvii.  1-5  :  •  Take  up  the  letter  of  the  blessed  Apostle  Paul. 


§  86.]   PREPARATORY   STAGES    IN    CANONISATION  OF  N.  T.     481 

2.  It  would  be  waste  of  time  to  make  so  much  as  a 
positive  conjecture  concerning  the  beginnings  of  a  collection 
of  the  New  Testament  writings.  Only  one  thing  is  certain  : 
that  no  collector  aimed  at  putting  together  a  New  Testament, 
that  the  idea  of  a  new  Canon  did  not  call  forth  the  collection, 
but  that  a  New  Testament  grew,  or  was  composed,  out  of  partial 
collections  which  were  already  in  existence.  Love  for  the 
great  Apostle  of  the  Gentiles  may  very  early  (perhaps  even 
during  his  lifetime)  have  inspired  the  attempt  to  seek  out  and 
collect  all  that  could  be  obtained  of  his  Epistles  ;  and  if  some 
of  the  oldest  quotations  from  the  Gospels  are  cited  as  standing 
in  the  Gospel  by  some  witness  who  certainly  had  several  Gospel 
writings  before  him,  this  figure  of  speech  is  to  be  explained  by 
the  custom  of  speaking  of  the  Gospel  as  a  unity,  and  by  the 
permanent  importance  of  this  conception  :  it  was  the  one,  true, 
redeeming  Gospel.  In  view  of  the  great  bulk  of  these 
writings,  it  is  quite  improbable  that  in  the  earliest  times 
several  Gospels  together  could  have  been  presented  as  a  whole, 
or  corpus,  in  outward  appearance.  The  hypothesis  that 
after  80  A.D.  a  complete  collection  of  Paul's  Epistles  to  the 
churches  was  sent  out,  possibly  from  Corinth,  and  dispersed 
through  Christendom,  has  no  foundation  ;  nor  does  it  receive 
much  support  from  the  fact  that  the  older  ecclesiastical  writers 
do  not  appear  to  use,  or  rather  to  know,  anything  like  the 
whole  of  Paul's  Epistles,  or  even  all  to  know  the  same  Epistles. 
To  deny  to  the  author  of  1.  Clement  the  knowledge  of  2.  Co- 
rinthians, because  he  only  mentions  and  analyses  l  the  letter 
of  the  Apostle  to  the  Corinthians,  is  too  rash  a  conclusion 
(Augustine,  for  instance,  speaks  in  the  same  way  of '  the  Epistle 
to  the  Thessalonians,'  though  he  was  equally  well  acquainted 
with  both  the  First  and  the  Second)  ;  but  it  is  also  impossible 
to  prove  the  writer's  acquaintance  with  2.  Corinthians  from  one 
or  two  points  of  contact.  There  is  no  difficulty  in  assuming 
that  in  different  churches,  before  the  period  of  Canonisation, 
collections  of  letters  which  were  originally  small  were  perhaps 
repeatedly  enlarged  solely  for  the  purpose  of  reading  aloud  in 
the  services.  Those  churches  where  the  Episties  of  Paul  were 
used  in  public  worship  at  all  were  not  likely  to  place  obstacles 

1  Ch.  xivi. 

1 1 


482       AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

in  the  way  of  their  complete  collection  ;  the  fear  that  without 
careful  examination  spurious  writings  might  easily  be  smuggled 
in  did  not  belong  to  the  times  of  which  we  are  treating,  any  more 
than  an  obstinate  conservative  predilection  for  old  tradition 
belongs  to  a  young  religion.  The  art  which  was  so  useful  to 
Christianity  was  that  of  immediately  regarding  as  traditional 
the  new  material  produced  by  a  very  rich  and  rapid  develop- 
ment, and  of  declaring  it  to  be  a  thing  accepted  in  all  places,  at 
all  times  and  by  all  men.  This  most  ancient  Catholic  art  was 
brilliantly  exemplified  in  the  history  of  the  Canon,  though 
the  actual  makers  of  the  New  Testament  certainly  had  no 
suspicion  of  this  merit  of  theirs.  Nevertheless,  unity  was 
in  all  respects  the  later  product.  It  is  but  a  poor  satis- 
faction to  imagine  that  at  any  rate  the  collection  of  Pauline 
Epistles  was  produced  in  its  final  shape  all  at  once,  when  we 
are  obliged  to  give  up  the  far  more  important  point,  that  the 
New  Testament  was  completed  at  one  stroke  'from  time 
immemorial.' 

Consequently  :  in  post-Apostolic  times,  writings  of  Chris- 
tian origin  found  a  place  in  the  Church  services  ;  kindred 
writings  were  gathered  together  and  in  some  cases  written 
the  same  roll ;  but  as  to  their  nature  and  number,  their  pla( 
and  time,  no  definite  conclusions  are  possible.  These  are 
questions  which  need  expect  no  answer  even  from  the  f  ortunal 
discovery  of  early  Christian  writings  supposed  to  be  losl 
nothing  but  the  most  consummate  folly  could,  in  the  year  19( 
1  cherish  great  hopes  that  the  original  New  Testament  will 
also  be  found  '  among  the  treasures  unearthed  in  some  mosque 
at  Damascus.  The  original  in  this  case  means  the  most 
complete  diversity :  its  development  is  determined  not  by  fixed 
principles,  but  by  use  and  chance,  by  taste,  nay,  even  by 
pecuniary  resources  available  at  a  given  moment. 


483 


CHAPTER   II 

THE   CREATION    OF   THE   PRIMITIVE    FORM    OF   THE    NEW 
TESTAMENT    CANON   (C.  140-C.  200) 

§  37.  The  Facts  of  the  Case 

1.  THE  writings  of  the  best-known  Apologist,  Justin  Martyr, 
jan  be  dated  with  tolerable  certainty.  He  died  at  Rome  in 
165  ;  about  150  he  wrote  his  two  *  Apologies,'  and  somewhat 
later  the  *  Dialogue '  with  the  Jew  Tryphon,  both  in  defence 
of  Christianity,  the  former  in  opposition  to  Gentile  mistrust, 
the  latter  against  Jewish  blindness.  He  makes  great  use  of 
the  Old  Testament,  and  lays  special  stress  on  the  harmony 
between  Prophecy  and  Fulfilment :  the  Holy  Ghost  spoke 
by -the  mouths  of  the  Prophets.  But  when  in  the  Apology  l 
he  refers  his  Gentile  readers  to  'our  Scriptures'  (TO,  rj^srspa 

^ypafjufjuara)  he  would  have  them  understand  thereby 
neither  the  Old  Testament  only  (Apol.  i.  67,  ra  crvyypdafjLara 

V  Trpo^rjTMv)  nor  all  the  productions  of  Christian  author- 
ship, including  his  own  dissertations :  he  meant  a  fairly 
definite  body  of  writings,  the  books  in  which  Christian  doctrine 
was  authentically  laid  down.  In  Justin's  view,  the  gift  of 
the  Spirit  was  what  guaranteed  the  truth  and  divinity  of  the 
Word :  and  since  in  his  Dialogue 2  he  exclaims  with  pride 
'  To  this  day  the  prophetic  gifts  are  still  at  work  among  us,' 
he  could  of  course  rank  the  prophet  John  with  the  prophets 
of  the  Old  Testament,  and  claim  unconditional  belief  in 
his  prophecy  of  the  millennium  (Rev.  xx.).  Nevertheless, 
the  ordinary  Christian  prophet  would  not  receive  so  much 
honour  at  his  hands,  and  it  is  not  without  design  that 
to  the  words  '  a  man  by  name  John  '  Justin  adds  '  one  of 
Christ's  Apostles.'  For  him  the  twelve  Apostles  are  the 

'  i.  28.  2  §  81. 

i  i  2 


484       AN   INTRODUCTIOl 


CHAP. 


teachers  of  the  truth,  '  even  for  us  of  a  later  generation 
implies,  through  the  writings  they  have  left.  In  the  Apology 
i.  66,  he  tells  us  that  the  Apostles  guaranteed  the  correctness 
the  Christian  celebration  of  the  Supper,  a  record  of  which  the; 
had  handed  down  in  the  Memoirs  (afro^vri^ovsv^ara}  arranged 
by  them,  and  called  Gospels.  Thus  Justin  regards  the  auth 
of  the  Gospels  as  Apostles  (he  uses  the  term  '  Memoirs '  merel 
to  be  better  understood  by  those  of  his  readers  who  posses 
Greek  culture:  the  ecclesiastical  name,  it  need  hardly 
said,  is  svayys\ia) ;  and  the  fact  that  they  were  eye-witnesses 
and  endowed  with  the  Spirit  of  the  Lord  places  the  authen- 
ticity of  their  Gospels  beyond  question  for  him.  Then  we 
find  from  i.  67  that  the  first  act  in  the  worship  of  God  on 
Sundays  was  to  read  aloud  before  the  whole  congregation 
a  portion  of  Scripture,  either  from  the  *  Memoirs '  of  the  Apostles 
or  the  writings  of  the  Prophets.  It  seems  to  me  that  there  is 
more  here  than  a  mere  '  germ  of  the  New  Testament  Canon  ' ; 
according  to  Justin  (and  he  is  a  witness  as  to  the  state  of 
things  in  the  Eoman  community  at  least),  the  Gospels  and 
the  writings  of  the  Prophets  are  placed  on  an  equal  foot- 
ing ;  they  may  be  used  interchangeably  as  required,  and 
certainly  the  '  Memoirs  '  belonged  to  the  most  precious  of  '  our 
Scriptures.' l  It  is  true  that  what  he  quotes  from  these  new 
books  are  almost  always  Sayings  of  the  Lord  2 ;  it  is  from  the 
Lord  Christ  that  Justin  believes  he  has  learnt  what  he  teaches, 
as  well  as  from  the  Prophets  who  went  before  him.  But 
the  important  point  is  that  the  Lord  was  to  be  found  in 
written  records  from  the  hands  of  *  the  most  trustworthy 
persons  ' 3 ;  it  was  in  books  that  this  incontrovertible  Canon 
was  contained  in  incontrovertible  form  ;  therefore  in  worth 
and  dignity  such  books  could  not)  stand  lower,  in  the  estima- 
tion of  a  Christian,  than  those  of  the  Old  Testament. 

With  this  the  decisive  step  is  taken  ;  the  Gospel,  the  glad 
tidings  of  salvation  through  Jesus  Christ,  has  condensed  in  In 
a  number  of  written  Gospels,  authentic  records  of  the  same, 
which  share  his  Divinity.  Henceforth  quotations  from  them  4 
are  introduced  with  the  formula  *  it  is  written'  (jEjpaTrrai),  and 


S 


1  i.  28. 


"  \6yta  Kvpiov. 
«  Dial  49,  100. 


s  Apol.  i.  33 


§  37.]  THE    FACTS   OF   THE    CASE  485 


even  with  ev  ro5  svayysXito,  in  the  Gospel.  The  impression 
which  Justin  leaves  upon  us,  of  accepting  the  accounts  of  the 
Evangelists  as  true  only  because  of  the  Old  Testament,  only 
because  their  testimony  coincided  with  the  predictions  of  the 
Prophets,  arises  from  the  necessities  of  his  apologetic  reason- 
ing ;  the  appeal  which  he  makes  to  the  great  antiquity  of  the 
truth  —  a  point  which  he  considers  of  much  importance  —  could 
not  of  course  be  made  in  the  case  of  books  which  had  only  lately 
come  into  existence.  Another  question  is,  what  books  Justin 
included  in  his  *  Memoirs.'  Matthew  was  certainly  one  of 
them  ;  the  claims  of  Mark  and  Luke  are  favoured,  amongst 
other  passages,  by  ch.  103  of  the  Dialogue,  where,  besides  the 
Apostles  of  Jesus,  their  companions  are  also  named  as  authors, 
though  with  more  hesitation.  He  is  unacquainted  with  the 
contents  of  John,  though  aware  of  its  existence.1  But  many  of 
his  quotations  from  the  words  of  Jesus  depart  so  far  from  the 
form  in  which  we  have  them  in  our  Gospels  that  it  is  difficult 
to  deny  him  the  knowledge  of  at  least  one  Gospel  unknown  to  us. 
He  accepted  as  a  Gospel,  without  criticism,  whatever  he  met 
with  under  that  name  ;  scarcely,  however,  on  his  own  private 
judgment,  but  rather  following  the  custom  in  his  community. 
Justin  is  also  acquainted  with  other  New  Testament 
writings  :  some  Epistles  of  Paul,2  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews, 
and  certainly  the  Acts  as  well  as  Luke,  but  he  does  not  quote 
them  as  standard  authorities.  There  is  nothing  remarkable 
in  the  fact  that  he  does  not  mention  Paul  by  name,  since  he 
does  not  name  the  other  Apostles  ;  and  the  fact  that  he  does 
not  actually  speak  of  an  Anagnosis  of  the  letters  of  the  Apostles 
does  not  prove  that  there  was  no  such  thing  in  his  time.  It 
must  not  be  forgotten  that  he  stands  in  the  annals  of  Eome 
between  Clement  and  Tatian,  both  of  whom  set  great  store  by 
Paul's  Epistles  ;  it  merely  did  not  occur  to  him  to  rank  these 
letters  with  the  Gospels.  Their  authority  was  a  derivative, 
transmitted  one  ;  the  only  occasion  on  which  the  word  of 
the  Apostles  comes  into  comparison  with  the  divine  word  of  the 
Old  Testament  is  where  it  treats  of  Christ  and  represents  the 
transmission  of  his  word  and  his  power  of  salvation  to  later 
generations.  This,  then,  is  the  primitive  form  of  the  New 

1  See  Apol.  i.  61.  3  E.g.  Romans. 


486      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP,  n 

Testament  Canon,  which  can  be  traced  in  the  most  advanced 
communities  about  the  year  150:  in  place  of  'the  Lord,' 
several  books  of  Gospels  revealing  the  Lord.  Thus  even  in 
the '  Teaching  of  the  Apostles  '  '  the  Gospel '  is  quoted  as  an 
existing  written  tradition  concerning  Jesus  :  and  in  the  Second 
Epistle  of  Clement  the  case  stands  exactly  as  with  Justin, 
the  Gospel  being  treated  as  Scripture  ;  at  least  one  Gospel- 
writing  which  is  now  lost  is  used  in  that  Epistle,  but  probably 
not  the  same  as  that  quoted  by  Justin. 

It  follows  that  the  oldest  Canon  of  the  New  Testament 
was  single  in  form.  As  we  found  that  *  the  Lord  '  was  its 
ideal  primitive  form,  extended  later  by  the  addition  of  '  the 
Apostles,'  so  the  tangible  actual  Canon  at  first  contained  only 
'  the  Scriptures  which  relate  everything  concerning  our  Lord 
Jesus  Christ.'  To  be  able  to  bring  them  into  relation  to  the 
Apostles,  as  their  writers  or  inspirers,  enhanced  their  value, 
but  they  attained  the  same  rank  as  the  Old  Testament,  not 
for  being  Apostolic,  but  as  Gospels,  and  it  was  not  till  later 
that  the  canonising  of  Apostolic  Gospels  led  further  to  the 
canonising  of  Apostolic  Epistles  and  prophecies. 

2.  The  Canon  of  Justin,  however,  must  not  immediately 
be  regarded  as  the  Canon  of  the  Catholic  Church,  which  was 
itself  in  embryo  at  that  time  (about  150).  Elsewhere  there 
appears  to  have  been  less  inclination  to  exchange  *  the  Lord : 
for  definite  written  accounts  of  him.  Papias  of  Hierapolis  in 
Phrygia  is  a  contemporary  of  Justin  ;  Eusebius  and  some  later 
writers  knew  of  a  work  of  his  in  five  books,  consisting  of  inter- 
pretations of  the  Sayings  of  the  Lord  (\oyicov  Kvpiatc&i' 
egrjyfaeis).  We  do  not  get  a  clear  idea  of  the  character  of  this 
work :  it  is  uncertain,  in  particular,  whether  the  author  rather 
aimed  at  being  a  translator  (from  the  Aramaic  original  into 
Greek)  or  an  expositor,  a  commentator  ;  in  any  case  he  had  pre- 
pared himself  for  this  work  by  a  long-continued,  careful  collec- 
tion of  the  Lord's  sayings.  He  had  at  least  Matthew  and  Mark } 
before  him,  and,  Eusebius  thinks,  the  Gospel  of  the  Hebrews  as 
well.  But  these  sources  were  not  canonical  authorities  in 
his  eyes  ;  he  preferred  to  draw  his  material  from  the  *  Elders  ' 
(irapa  TMV  irpe^jBvrepwv  KCL\WS  EfjuaOov):  c  And  if  I  met  with 
1  See  pp.  302-305,  317-319. 


§  37.]  THE   FACTS   OP   THE   CASE  487 

a  disciple  of  the  Elders,  I  questioned  him  fully  as  to  the  words 
of  those  Elders,  what  was  said  by  Andrew,  Peter  or  Philip, 
what  by  Thomas,  James,  John  or  Matthew,  or  any  other  of 
the  disciples  of  the  Lord,  and  what  is  said  by  Aristion  and 
the  presbyter  John,  the  disciples  of  the  Lord.  For  I  was  of 
opinion  that  what  I  could  derive  from  books  would  not  serve 
me  so  well  as  what  I  could  obtain  from  the  living  and 
enduring  voice  (fwo-a  <f>a)vr)  /ecu  fjuevovo-a) .'  We  could  not  have 
a  more  definite  rejection  of  any  canonical  valuation  of  the 
Gospel  writings,  in  favour  of  the  old  unwritten  traditions 
(Trapd&ocris  aypafyos)  ;  oral  tradition  guaranteed  by  known 
and  trustworthy  intermediaries  seemed  to  Papias  to  be  better 
secured  from  falsification  and  error  than  was  the  case  with 
written  memoirs.  But  to  a  man  like  Eusebius  he  must 
have  appeared  exceedingly  limited  on  account  of  this  anti- 
quated point  of  view,  even  if  the  tradition  had  not  brought 
many  very  doubtful  sayings  of  the  Lord  into  his  collection ; 
but  he  is  still  a  high  authority  to  the  great  Catholic  Irenaeus 
(about  180),  although  the  latter  was  as  zealous  for  the 
Scriptures  as  Eusebius  himself.  Thus  the  conservative  attitude 
of  Papias  with  regard  to  this  new  canonical  structure  was 
not  at  once  felt  to  be  ecclesiastically  incorrect ;  his  point  of 
view  was  that  of  many  at  the  time.  It  is  probable,  on  the 
face  of  it,  that  such  an  active  collector  as  Papias  was  also 
acquainted  with  other  early  Christian  literature ;  we  have 
no  reason  to  doubt  the  statement  that  he  recognised  the 
contents  of  the  Apocalypse  as  genuine  Pievelation :  the 
book  must  have  been  welcome  to  his  strong  belief  in  the 
Millennium.  As  to  the  quotations  !  from  1.  John  and  1.  Peter 
which  Eusebius  found  in  his  writings,  they  need  not  have 
consisted  in  a  solemn  appeal  as  though  to  Holy  Scripture ;  in 
such  '  statistics  with  a  purpose '  Eusebius  does  not  distinguish 
between  the  mere  employment  of  passages  and  actual  citation. 
Much  of  what  is  now  the  New  Testament  must,  then,  have 
been  read  aloud  for  edification  m  the  church  of  Hierapolis  and 
elsewhere  about  150,  and  must  have  had  a  religious  influence 
on  the  community,  just  as  in  Rome ;  but  the  feeling  that 
the  regular  Scriptures  of  the  Christians  must  include  some 

1  fj-aprvpiai. 


488      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

of  Christian  origin,  serving  to  keep  alive  the  memory  of 
Christ,  does  not  arise  everywhere  equally  early.  The  new 
material  for  public  reading  increases ;  the  Epistles  of  the 
martyr  Ignatius  are  sent  from  the  Church  of  Smyrna  to  that 
of  Philippi  at  the  latter's  request.  A  missive  of  the  Eoman 
Bishop  Soter  is  read  aloud  in  the  Sunday  service  at  Corinth 
(about  180)  beside  1.  Clement.  But  nothing  is  to  be  learnt 
about  the  esteem  in  which  the  Gospels  were  held  from  such 
facts  as  these.  When  Hegesippus  wrote  his  reminiscences, 
about  180,  he  could  report  that  in  his  travels  he  had  found  all 
the  communities  at  one  as  to  their  doctrine,  which  was  regulated 
upon  the  Law,  the  Prophets  and  '  the  Lord.'  In  his  mouth  '  the 
Lord  '  is  here  probably  an  archaism  for  the  '  Gospels,'  as 
when  elsewhere  he  places  together  '  the  Divine  Scriptures  and 
the  Lord  ' ;  if  not,  Hegesippus  belongs  to  the  same  category 
as  Papias,  but  this  admission  would  not  interfere  with  his 
respect  for  the  holy  Choir  of  the  Apostles,  and  his  close 
acquaintance  with  the  Canonical  Gospels.1 

3.  But  beside  Justin,  who  consciously  extended  the  idea 
of  the  *  Scriptures '  to  the  Gospels,  and  Papias,  who,  in  old 
age  as  in  youth,  only  held  as  Divine  Scriptures  what  the 
Lord  himself  had  so  held,  there  stands  another  Christian, 
who  extended  the  new  Canon  farther,  and  conferred  Canonical 
dignity  upon  the  second  principal  part  of  the  New  Testament, 
the  Epistles  of  Paul.  This  was  the  Gnostic  Marcion.  Gnosti- 
cism, in  its  original  form  older  than  Christianity,  had  very 
early  pressed  in  upon  the  Church,  and  had  practised  upon  it 
its  peculiar  art  of  transforming  everything,  even  the  most 
chaste  simplicity,  into  chaotic  disorder  by  passing  it  through 
its  own  witches'  cauldron.  Naturally,  it  had  little  inclina- 
tion to  form  a  Canon :  the  prejudice  of  the  '  man  of  the 
spirit,'  for  whom  a  double  truth  was  the  natural  con- 
dition, and  who  looked  upon  a  universally  valid  rule  of 
thought  and  life  as  an  abomination,  was  particularly  con- 
cerned to  remove  the  limits  imposed  by  a  sacred  letter  upon 
the  speculations  or  the  desires  of  the  individual.  Never- 
theless, the  most  prominent  representatives  of  this  ten- 
dency, such  as  Basilides  and  Valentine,  were  very  anxious 

1  As  well  as  with  Jewish  unwritten  tradition. 


§  37.]  THE    FACTS    OF   THE   CASE  489 

to  prove  the  Christian  character  of  their  views  by  written 
documents.  They  appealed  indeed  to  special  traditions  about 
Jesus l  and  the  Apostles,  but  were  not  inclined  to  reject 
what  the  Church  used  for  her  edification ;  rather  they 
proved  their  acumen  by  the  art  of  interpreting  the  sacred 
writings  of  the  Church  in  a  sense  favourable  to  their  own 
imaginings  ;  they  believed  that  they  and  their  scholars  alone 
understood  rightly  the  *  words  of  the  Saviour,'  and  the  first 
Commentary  on  John  was  written  by  a  Valentinian  (see 
p.  401).  But  the  man  through  whom  Gnosticism  became 
a  Church,  existing  for  centuries  living  and  self-dependent,  and 
who  was  certainly  in  many  respects  very  different  from  his 
above-mentioned  associates,  particularly  in  the  manifest 
preponderance  he  gave  to  the  religious  and  moral  needs 
over  the  intellectual,  anticipated  the  great  church  from 
which  he  separated  himself  by  drawing  up  a  new  Christian 
Canon. 

Marcion,  from  his  home  in  Pontus,  made  his  way  to 
Kome  through  Asia  Minor,  and  was  active  there  between 
c.  140  and  170 ;  he  rejected  the  Old  Testament  as  incom- 
patible with  the  New,  asserting  that  it  contained  but  the 
revelation  of  the  Creator  of  the  world,  the  friend  of 
blood  and  war,  the  God  of  Jewish  righteousness.  The  true, 
good  God  had  sent  Jesus  to  redeem  men  from  the  tyranny  of 
the  righteous  God ;  but  the  Jews,  even  including  the  Twelve, 
did  not  understand  him  ;  Paul  alone  understood  the  Gospel 
and  successfully  combated  the  falsification  it  had  suffered 
through  Jewish  additions ;  the  truth,  the  freedom-giving 
truth,  was  only  to  be  found  with  the  real  Jesus  and  his 
real  Apostle.  Marcion  himself  had  no  wish  to  be  the  founder 
of  a  religion  :  he  only  tried  to  be  a  true  interpreter  of  an 
existing  revelation,  the  comprehension  of  which  he  had  won 
by  a  study,  unprejudiced  as  he  believed,  of  all  the  reputed 
records  of  revelation.  And,  at  all  events,  he  shunned  the 
allegorical  interpretations  which  enabled  the  Church  to  conceal 
from  herself  the  discrepancies  between  the  Jewish  and  the 
Christian  religions,  although  he  rivalled  every  Catholic  in 
arbitrary  violence  to  the  text  in  the  interest  of  his  dogma. 

1  Such  as  the  Gospel  of  Matthias. 


490      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

Marcion  was  too  conscientious  not  to  deduce  the  full  conse- 
quences  from  what   he  knew  ;   he  was  not  a  man  of   com- 
promise or  of  ingenious  half-measures  ;    in  his  Canon  there 
was  no  room  for  Jewish  Scriptures  ;  nothing  was  sacred  in 
his  eyes  that  did  not  originate  with  the  Lord  or  with  Paul,  and 
so  his  *  Scripture '  is  composed  of  two  sections  :  the  Gospel 
and  the  Apostle  (also  TO  aTroo-rdXiicov).     Among  the  Gospel 
writings  current  in  the  Church  he  approved  most  cordially 
of  Luke,  probably  because  he  believed  its  author  to  have  been 
a  disciple  of  Paul.     But  he  could  not  make  use  of  the  actual 
Luke  of  the  Church,  for  many  passages  in  that  Gospel  recog- 
nised the  Old  Testament  and  favoured  Jewish  conceptions  ; 
accordingly  he  subjected  it  to  a  most  searching  revision,  dis- 
carding everything  that  contradicted  his  anti-Jewish,  hyper- 
spiritualistic  point  of  view  (e.g.,  the  whole  of  the  Birth-story 
and  the  Old  Testament  quotations).     He  was  firmly  convinced 
that  in  doing  this  he  was  not  wresting  the  word  of  God  to 
suit   his   own  theology,  but  only  restoring  what   had   been 
corrupted  by  pseudo-Christian  '  Protectores  Judaismi.'     His 
'  Apostolicum '  contains  ten    Pauline  Epistles — the  nine   to 
the  churches,  and  Philemon — but  he  appears  not   to  have 
known  the  Pastoral  Epistles.1     He  could  not  have  had  much 
in  common  with  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  because  of  the 
continual  references  it  contains  to  the  Old  Testament,  but  apart 
from  that  it  probably  did  not  occur  to  him  to  include  it,  be- 
cause no  one  in  his  surroundings  ascribed  it  to  Paul.     Natu- 
rally, he  had  to  clear  the  text  of  the  Epistles  from  Judaising 
interpolations  as  thoroughly  as  that  of  the  Gospel,  and  for 
this  the  Church  bitterly  called  him  the  '  falsifier  of  the  truth  ' ; 
but  he  never  realised  that  in  these  arbitrary  proceedings  he 
had    permitted    his    own    likings    (ra    apscncovra    avrw)     to 
decide  as  to  what  was   Canonical   and   what  was  spurious  ; 
what  his  own  faith  did  not  admit  could  not  belong  to  God's 
Word,  and  therefore  he  felt  obliged  to  strike  it  out.     How  far 
he  employed  the  old-established  Church  formulae  in  referring 
to  or  in  making  use  of  this  Bible  of  his  we  do  not  know  ;  but 
certain  it  is  that  he  looked  upon  it  as  a  Canonical  authority, 
every  word  of  which  was  sacred.     He  wrote  a  great  work, 

1   See  pp.  180  fol. 


§  37.]  THE    FACTS   OF   THE    CASE  491 

the  'Antitheses,'  in  order  to  point  out  the  contradictions 
between  the  false  Jewish  '  Scripture '  and  the  genuine  new 
'  Scripture,'  and  to  offer  with  the  utmost  completeness  the 
true  explanation  of  all  parts  of  the  latter ;  here  he  is  but  the 
commentator  of  a  Divine  text,  and  although  his  sect  after- 
wards included  these  '  Antitheses '  in  their  Canon  beside  the 
'  Gospel '  and  the  '  Apostle,'  this  was  done  quite  against  the 
intention  of  their  master.  In  spite  of  the  fierce  hatred  which 
the  Church  bestowed  from  the  very  first  upon  this  most 
dangerous  of  all  the  Gnostics,  she  did  but  follow  his  lead  in 
drawing  up  the  new  Canon,  by  adding  to  the  Gospels  of  the 
Lord  the  Letters  of  his  Apostles. 

4.  In  the  decades  following  the  time  of  Justin's  activity, 
we  may  observe  a  double  tendency  in  ecclesiastical  literature, 
that  of  a  further  consolidation,  a  narrower  circumscription 
of  the  new  Gospel  Canon,  and  that  of  a  closer  approximation 
of  the  completed  collection  of  Pauline  Epistles  to  the  Gospels. 
In  the  Epistle  of  Polycarp,  the  date  of  which  is  unfortunately 
quite  uncertain,  the  Gospels  of  Matthew  and  Luke  are  made 
use  of,  but  the  Epistle  is  so  short  that  this  is  no  complete 
evidence  for  the  exclusion  of  all  '  Apocryphal '  Gospels  ;  so 
much  the  more  marked,  however,  is  the  enthusiasm  with 
which  the  author  refers  to  the  blessed  and  glorious  Paul : 
he  also  alludes  expressly  to  his  Epistles,  passages  from  which 
so  often  find  an  echo  in  his  writings  that  we  may  be  quite 
sure  he  was  thoroughly  familiar  with  the  whole  body  of 
them,  including  the  Pastorals,  and  lived,  as  it  were,  in 
an  atmosphere  of  them.  The  same  holds  good  of  the 
Acts,  1.  Peter,  1.  John,  and  1.  Clement.  Indeed,  in  xii.  1  we 
might  even  say  that  he  applied  the  term  '  Scriptures  '  to  the 
letters  of  the  Apostles,  if  the  Latin  translation  (which  is  here 
our  only  authority) ,  with  its  '  his  scripturis  dictum  est '  as 
applied  both  to  Psalm  iv.  5  and  Eph.  iv.  26,  were  a 
literal  rendering.  That  is,  however,  not  certain.  Tatian, 
who  wrote  his  '  Oratio  ad  Graecos '  about  the  year  155,  a  few 
years  after  the  appearance  of  Justin's  '  Apology,'  took  up 
almost  the  same  position  with  regard  to  the  literature  of  the 
New  Testament.  He  introduces  L  a  sentence  out  of  the  prologue 

1  Ch.  is. 


492      AX   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 
of  John  l  most  impressively  as  TO  slpripsvov.     Athenagoras, 


who  lived  about  twenty  years  later,  appeals  with  the  same 
formula  (ty^o-iv)  to  a  sentence  in  the  Gospels  2  as  he  does  to 
Proverbs  viii.  22  ;  and  the  way  in  which  he  appeals  to  1.  Cor. 
xv.  53,  and  2.  Cor.  v.  10  as  authoritative  evidence  (KOTO.  rbv 
dTroa-ToXov),  shows  that  he  recognised  very  little  difference 
between  a  sentence  in  a  letter  of  the  Apostle  and  one  in  a  book 
of  Prophecy.  His  contemporary  Melito,  Bishop  of  Sardis, 
occupied  himself  with  an  accurate  enumeration  of  the  'Books  of 
the  Old  Covenant,'  the  '  Old  Books,'  and  he  would  hardly  have 
expressed  himself  thus  if  the  books  of  the  New  Covenant,  con- 
sequently a  new  Canon,  had  not  been  a  familiar  idea  to  him. 
Most  of  the  ecclesiastical  literature  of  those  decades  has 
disappeared,  and  of  some  which  might  perhaps  belong  to  that 
time  the  date  is  too  uncertain  ;  but  the  advance  from  the 
position  of  Justin  is  sufficiently  indicated,  apart  from  the 
works  of  the  writers  mentioned  above,  by  the  books  of 
Theophilus  of  Antioch,  addressed  to  Autolycus  and  written 
about  190.  The  Gospels  are  here  distinctly  ranked  with  the 
Prophets  ;  their  writers  are  spoken  of  as  equally  inspired 
(TrvsvfjbaTocfropol)  with  those  of  the  Old  Testament  Scriptures. 
That  he  ever  used  an  '  Apocryphal  '  Gospel  cannot  be  proved  ; 
we  may  well  believe  that  to  him  the  sacred  number  of  four 
was  an  established  idea.  He  regards  the  Apocalypse  in  the 
same  light  as  Justin.  But  he  lays  far  more  stress  than  his 
predecessors  upon  the  Pauline  Epistles,  again  including  the 
Pastorals  ;  they  have  indeed  not  yet  reached  the  high  position 
of  the  Gospels,  but  Theophilus  does  not  shrink  from  present- 
ing a  conglomerate  of  Pauline  sayings  as  a  '  Commandment  of 
the  Divine  Word.'  From  this  it  is  but  a  step  to  the  placing  of 
the  Apostolic  writings  on  a  perfect  equality  with  the  Gospel. 
That  this  step  however  was  not  yet  absolutely  taken  is 
clearly  shown  by  the  '  Acta  Martyrum  Scilitanorum.'  Here 
we  read  that  in  July  180  the  question  of  a  Proconsul, 
1  What  manner  of  things  lie  in  your  cupboards  ?  '  was  answered 
by  a  North  African  Christian  with  the  words,  '  Our  books,  and 
also  the  Epistles  of  Paul,  the  holy  man  '  (at  tcaO'  r^as  filfiXoi 
KOI  al  Trpos  STrl  TOVTOis  £7Ti,o'To\al  HavXov  Tov  6(7Lov  avftpos). 
1  John  i.  5.  2  Matthew  v.  28. 


§  37.]  THE    FACTS   OF   THE    CASE  493 

Since  the  Gospels  cannot  have  been  wanting  if  the  Epistles 
of  Paul  were  there,  we  must  imagine  that  the  '  books  '  referred 
either  to  them  alone  or  to  a  number  of  books  including  them. 
The  original  Latin  text  of  the  Protocol  may  have  run, 
according  to  the  best  recently  discovered  manuscript,  '  Libri 
venerandi  libri  legis  divinae  et  epistulae  Pauli  viri  iusti '  (a 
later  recension  says, '  Libri  evangeliorum  et  epistolae  Pauli  viri 
sanctisshniapostoli');  but  in  any  case  the  passage  shows  that 
the  Epistles  of  Paul  were  not  yet  reckoned  as  part  of  the  Divine 
Law,  as  among  the  books  /car  tgoxijv,  from  which  no  one  will 
here  venture  to  exclude  the  Gospels ;  but  that  they  were 
treasured  as  books  for  public  reading  by  the  churches,  and 
could  be  submitted  to  the  authorities  with  a  good  conscience. 
I  wish  neither  to  maintain  nor  to  contradict  the  theory  that  the 
Scilitan  Martyrs  had  exactly  four  Gospels  in  their  cupboard, 
as  a  third  recension  would  have  us  believe.  This  recension, 
moreover,  has  the  addition  which  is  so  characteristic  of  the 
needs  of  a  later  time,  '  et  omnem  divinitus  inspiratam 
scripturam.'  We  may  conclude,  then,  that  the  Gospel  had 
probably  penetrated  everywhere  in  the  Church  by  about  180 
as  a  component  part  of  the  Holy  Scripture,  i.e.  of  the  Law ; 
but  what  this  Gospel  consisted  of  was  not  regularly  denned  in 
all  churches  alike. 

The  best  evidence  of  this  is  given  by  the  above-mentioned 
apologist  Tatian,  in  a  work  which  at  first  sight  would  seem 
to  upset  our  last  conclusion  altogether.  According  to  Euse- 
bius,1  Tatian,  when  in  later  years  he  had  become  the  head  of 
a  separate  Encratite  church,  prepared  a  '  Harmony  of  the 
Gospels '  under  the  name  Ata  -rscradpwv.  He  arranged  a 
continuous  account  of  Jesus  (whether  only  in  his  native 
Syriac  tongue  or  in  both  Greek  and  Syriac  is  here  without 
importance)  out  of  the  Gospel  writings  at  his  command, 
omitting  all  parallel  accounts,  and  reconciling  apparent  con- 
tradictions ;  he  probably  made  use  of  this  opportunity  to  exalt 
the  Encratite  elements  in  these  traditions,  and  to  give  a 
different  colour  to  any  inconvenient  sections.  He  composed 
this  Gospel  for  practical  use,  not  with  any  scientific  aims  ; 
almost  the  whole  Syrian  Church  accepted  it ;  the  Syrian 

1  Hist.  Ecclcs.  IV.  xxix.  G. 


494      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

doctor  Aphraates  (c.  340)  drew  his  knowledge  of  the  Gospel 
material  chiefly  from  this  Diatessaron.  Ephraim  (about  360) 
wrote  a  Syriac  commentary  on  it,  and  Theodoretus  of  Cyrus,1 
in  the  district  of  the  Euphrates,  though  he  burnt  several 
hundred  copies,  had  great  difficulty  in  eliminating  this  work 
from  the  services  of  the  churches  in  his  diocese,  and  in  sub- 
stituting for  it  the  *  separate '  Gospels — that  is  to  say,  the  four 
Gospels  in  their  natural  limits. 

If  the  Church  might  and  could  suffer  such  a  condition  of 
things  as   one   Gospel  in  place  of  four,   until   far   into   the 
fifth  century,  she  would  certainly  not  have  objected  to  such 
a  substitution  about  the  year  175.     Tatian  did  not  write  the 
Diatessaron  as  a  heretic  or  as  a  sectary,  nor  even  for  the  benefit 
of  his  own  sect,  but  did  the  work  in  all  good  faith  ;  for  him,  as 
for  all  his  Christian  contemporaries,  what  was  divine  in  the 
Gospel  was  the  tradition  about  Jesus :  it  did  not  seem  at  all 
essential  to  have  this  tradition  in  twofold  or  in  fourfold  form. 
It  was  the   contents  which  were  of  inestimable  value ;  the 
apotheosis  of  the  letter  had  not  yet  taken  place.     Perhaps  even 
the  conclusion   drawn   from   the   name  Am  rsao-dpwv,   that 
Tatian  only  made  use  of  the  four  known  Gospels,  is  a  mistake  ; 
this  word  is  a  technical  musical  term  for  '  accord,'  *  harmony,' 
the  ostensible  foundation  of  all  music,'2  and  he  might  have  made 
use  of  the  name  to  indicate  that  his  work  was  an  harmonious 
abridgment  of  the  different  Gospel  writings,  whether  drawn 
from   three   or   from   five.     In    any  case,  it  was   a   Gospel 
harmony  or  symphony.     Certainly,  however,  what  we  know 
of  the  Diatessaron  would  incline  us  to  the  belief  that  it  is 
founded  on  our  four  Gospels  alone,  and  consequently  that 
Tatian  was  more  careful  in  dealing  with  the  Gospel  legends 
than  his  teacher  Justin. 

About  the  same  time  there  existed  a  party,  dispersed 
through  Asia  Minor,  called  the  Alogi  by  their  opponents  ;  they 
refused  to  accept  John,  because  his  theology  offended  them  ; 
they  certainly  did  not  feel  themselves  to  be  heretics  and 
revolutionists,  but  defenders  of  the  old  Church  tradition 
against  the  new  learning ;  nor  were  they  at  first  reproached 
with  refusing  to  accept  four  divine  Gospels,  but  simply  with 

1  t  457.  *  Cf.  Dion  Cassius,  xxxvii.  18. 


§  a?.]  TIII;  FACTS  OF  THE  CASE  495 

attacking  a  doctrine  which  was  that  of  the  Church,  and  ratified 
by  the  highest  authorities. 

It  is  a  remarkable  coincidence  (or  is  it  due  to  later  con- 
fusion ?)  that  the  same  Tatian  who  established,  like  Marcion, 
one  Gospel  instead  of  many  as  the  Gospel,  is  also  said  to 
have  issued,  like  Marcion,  a  new  recension  of  the  Pauline 
Epistles,  ostensibly  freeing  them  only  from  faults  of  style.  In 
any  case,  this  showed  how  anxious  he  was  that  these  Epistles 
should  have  an  unimpeded  influence  on  the  community,  how 
highly  he  valued  them,  and  at  the  same  time  how  little  the 
externals,  the  form,  appeared  to  him  sacred  and  unalterable. 
The  Church  could  not  long  deal  so  freely  with  the  fundamental 
sources  of  her  faith  ;  the  '  holy  things '  which  she  possessed 
in  written  form  must  find  a  place  of  safety  against  the 
encroachments  of  human  caprice  ;  soon,  then,  we  shall  expect 
to  find  the  conceptions  of  the  New  Testament  more  narrowly 
circumscribed,  more  clearly  defined. 

5.  Towards  the  close  of  the  second  century,  the  new  Canon 
had  already  acquired  quite  a  different  appearance  in  the  standard 
literature  of  the  Church  from  that  which  it  bore  in  Justin's 
day.  It  is  enough,  first  of  all,  to  refer  to  the  writings  of  Irenaeus, 
bishop  of  Lyons,1  of  Tertullian,  a  Presbyter  of  Carthage,2 
and  of  Clement,  a  theologian  of  Alexandria.3  The  principal 
work  of  the  first-named,  the  five  books  against  all  heresies, 
is  unfortunately  only  partially  preserved  in  the  original  Greek, 
but  the  old  Latin  translation  is  trustworthy,  and  there  is  no 
doubt  as  to  the  time  of  its  composition — between  178  and  195. 
Still  more  important  is  the  fact — of  which  we  may  be  quite 
certain — that  Irenaeus,  although  by  birth  an  Asiatic  and  at  the 
end  of  his  life  a  Gallican  bishop,  represents,  on  account  of  his 
Roman  training,  the  Roman  standpoint  in  ecclesiastical  ques- 
tions. Tertullian  represents  that  of  the  African  Church  ;  and 
he  began  to  write  about  the  time  that  Irenaeus  ceased.  The 
countless  tracts  and  controversial  writings  of  this  inimitable 
man  fall  between  the  years  195  and  220 ;  he  wrote  them  in 
part  as  a  member  of  the  Church  Universal,  in  part  as  a 
Montanistic  sectary.  Clement,  who  surpassed  both  in  breadth, 
reading  and  intellectual  freedom,  shows  us  the  views  concerning 

1  t  c.  200.  *  t  c.  230.  3  t  c.  220. 


AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  ir. 

the  Canonical  books  held  in  Alexandria,  which  had  by  now 
become  the  centre — practically  owing  to  his  influence — of  the 
theological  culture  of  the  Greek  world.  Where  these  three 
agree,  it  certainly  does  not  follow  that  the  whole  of  Christendom 
was  at  one  with  them — many  a  community  had  not  moved 
so  fast  as  these  leaders — but  through  them  the  path  was 
marked  out  which  the  whole  Church  must  follow  sooner  or 
later  ;  by  them  the  decision  was  made.  If  on  certain  points 
they  do  not  agree,  this  clearly  shows  that  the  Canon  was  not 
the  result  of  consultation  and  decrees  in  council  ;  the  very  way 
in  which  it  came  into  being  ought  to  prepare  us  for  local  and 
provincial  differences  ;  it  was  the  task  of  a  still  later  genera- 
tion to  remove  these  differences,  and  to  realise  here  also 
the  ideal  of  Catholicity. 

Now,  these  three  agree  on  two  principal  points  :  first,  that 
the  new  Gospel  Canon  was  strictly  limited,  and  consisted  of  the 
four  Gospels  of  Matthew,  John  (themselves  Apostles)  and 
Mark  and  Luke  (Apostles'  disciples) ;  this  was  the  only,  but  also 
the  absolutely  authentic,  tradition  about  the  Lord,  or,  rather,  it 
was  a  substitute  for  the  Lord  ;  and  secondly,  that  beside  these 
four  Gospels  there  had  arisen  a  series  of  Apostolic  writings, 
which  held  equal  authority  as  the  second  half  of  the  new 
Holy  Scripture ;  they  were  in  like  manner  the  sole  but 
authentic  source  of  Apostolic  teaching  and  rules  ;  in  short, 
they  represented  the  Apostles.  The  Pauline  Epistles  formed 
the  kernel  of  this  section.  Consequently,  the  primitive  form 
of  the  New  Testament  of  to-day  was  created  about  200  ;  after 
this  there  was  nothing  needed  but  its  recognition  in  all  the 
churches,  and  the  establishment  of  the  same  definite 
boundaries  between  canonical  and  uncanonical  for  the  Apo- 
stolic writings  as  that  which  had  been  achieved  for  the 
Gospels  between  140  and  200. 

To  Irenaeus  the  fourfold  form  of  the  Gospel 1  is  so  much 
a  matter  of  course  that  he  finds  it  prefigured  in  all  kinds  of 
theosophic  fancies,  such  as  the  four  winds  and  the  four  quarters 
of  the  world ;  he  was  the  first,  indeed,  to  make  the  famous 

1   III.  xi.  8,  6  \6yos  ttuKfv  TJM*"  re-rpa/JiopQov  rb  tvo.yye\iov,   cvl  5e 


§  37.]  THE    FACTS   OF   THE    CASE  497 

identification  of  the  four  Beasts  of  Revelation  l  with  the  four 
Evangelists  (Matthew  with  the  man,  Luke  with  the  calf, 
John  with  the  eagle,  Mark  with  the  lion— but  Irenaeus 
reverses  the  last  two  symbols,  while  others  again  arranged 
them  differently) ;  every  attack  on  the  number  four,  whether 
to  introduce  more  or  fewer  embodiments  of  the  Gospel,  seems 
to  him  heretical  presumption.  And  in  authoritative  value 
these  Gospels  were  in  no  way  behind  the  old  sacred  books  ; 
in  II.  xxviii.  2  fol.,  for  instance,  he  asserts  that  all  '  Scriptures  ' 
were  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  perfect,  and  the  gift  of  God  ;  in  his 
employment  of  citations  he  makes  no  difference  between 
Evangelistic  and  Old  Testament  materials.  The  same  may  be 
said  of  Tertullian  from  his  earliest  to  his  latest  writings.2 
He  speaks  of  the  '  Evangelicum  instrumentum ' — that  is  to 
say,  the  *  authoritative  record  '  existing  in  the  four  Gospels. 
Clement  quotes  words  from  all  four  Gospels  as  words  of 
*  Scripture,' 3  and  distinguishes  4  between  '  the  four  Gospels 
handed  down  to  us  '  and  the  Gospel  according  to  the  Egyptians, 
whose  *  words  of  the  Lord  '  were  not  sufficiently  trustworthy. 
But  when  Tertullian  appeals  to  the  '  Divinum  instru- 
mentum,' or  even  to  the  *  totum  instrumentum  utriusque 
testamenti,'  he  has,  besides  the  Old  Testament,  not  only  the 
books  of  the  Gospel,  but  a  number  of  Apostolic  writings  in 
view.  *  Evangelicae  et  Apostolicae  literae '  stand,  for  him, 
beside  '  lex  et  prophetae.'  The  Apostolic  writings  ('  apostoli 
literae  '),  just  as  much  as  the  Gospel  of  the  Lord,  certify  that 
the  Church  has  one  baptism,  and  in  the  De  Baptismo,  2, 
a  sentence  of  Paul's  is  introduced  before  a  logion  of  Jesus 
taken  from  Matthew,  as  a  Divine  utterance.  The  equality  of 
1.  Corinthians  with  the  Old  Testament  cannot  be  more  clearly 
expressed  than  in  the  De  Oratione,  22  ('  apostolus  eodem 
utique  spiritu  actus,  quo  cum  omnis  Scriptura  divina  turn  et 
ilia  Genesis  digesta  est').  Even  Irenseus r>  distinctly  reckons 
the  Pauline  Epistles,  like  the  Gospel  of  Luke,  with  the  '  Scrip- 
tures,' i.e.  with  the  record  of  revelation  contained  in  the  two 
Testaments,  and  incapable  of  self-contradiction  ;  and  although 

1  Rev.  iv.  7;  Ezek.  i.  10,  x.  14 

2  Principally  the  Contra  Marcionem,  iv.  2.         s  E.g.,  Strom.  VI.  xviii.  164. 
4  III.  xiii.  93.  o  E.g.,  III.  xii.  12. 

K  K 


498       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

none  of  his  quotations  from  Paul  (which  amount  to  over 
200)  are  made  with  the  solemn  introductory  formula — i.e. 
directly  designated  as  Scripture— yet  he  treats  the  Gospels  in 
almost  the  same  manner.  Here,  on  New  Testament  ground, 
Irenaeus  is  perfectly  at  home,  and  even  makes  a  point  of  iden- 
tifying the  sources  whence  he  draws  with  some  precision ; 
while  with  the  Old  Testament  quotations  he  often  does  not 
know  to  which  book  he  is  referring.  But  even  if  Irenaeus 
consciously  distinguished  Scriptures  (i.e.  the  Old  Testament), 
Gospels  and  Apostles,  that  would  only  show  that  he  was  under 
the  influence  of  an  older  habit  of  speech,  in  which  the  three 
degrees  still  existed.  I  cannot  discover  in  Irenaeus  the 
slightest  trace  of  the  idea  that  he  looked  upon  the  Pauline 
Epistles  merely  as  the  secondary  authorities  for  his  Scriptural 
proof,  for  in  that  case  it  would  indeed  be  extraordinary  that  he 
should  almost  have  preferred  the  secondary  to  the  primary ! 

Clement  of  Alexandria,  too,  seldom  quotes  sentences  of 
Paul  as '  Scripture,' l  but  neither  does  he  apply  this  term  very 
frequently  to  the  Gospels.2  The  Apostle's  words  are  made 
use  of  in  argument  quite  promiscuously,  along  with  words  of 
the  Lord  and  of  Scripture  ;  the  Prophets,  the  Gospel  and  the 
Apostle  make  together  a  '  Scripture  of  the  Lord  '  rich  in 
unerring  wisdom.3  Finally,  the  difference  in  the  manner  of 
quotation  which  may  still  be  observed  centuries  later,  is 
explained  by  the  necessity  of  making  the  new  sources  of 
Revelation  known  as  such  ;  but  there  was  no  common  name 
for  these  which  would  at  the  same  time  indicate  their  close 
connection  with  the  Old  Testament.  It  is  true  that  '  both 
Testaments  '  were  already  spoken  of,  but  in  doing  so  Clement 
of  Alexandria,  as  well  as  Tertullian,  thinks  more  of  the 
contents  of  the  books  concerned  than  of  the  books  themselves.4 
Men  accustomed  to  give  two  names  to  the  Old  Scriptures,  the 
Law  and  the  Prophets,  would  probably  find  it  easy  to  express 
the  dual  nature  of  the  New  Canon  in  the  words  '  the 
Gospel  and  the  Apostles  '  (or  svayyeXi/ca  KCU  arrroa-ro\LK(i). 

But  the  second  and  younger  part  of  it  was  not  nearly  so 


1  Strom.  I.  xvii.  87-xviii.  88.  2  E.g.,  Strom.  VI.  xviii.  164. 

1  Strom.  VII.  xvi.  01-97,  ot  Kvpianal  ypa<j>al,  or  else  in  the  singular. 
4  Stroni.  VI.  v.  42. 


§  37.]  THE    FACTS   OF   THE   CASE  499 

well  defined  as  the  first.     Everyone  included   the   thirteen 
letters  of  the  Apostle  tear  s^o-^jjv— for  that  Irenaeus  does  not 
mention   Philemon  is   a   mere  chance.     But  Paul  had  not 
been  the  only  Apostle  ;  it  would  be  impossible   to   imagine 
any  reason  why  the  Church  should  reject  the  epistles,  dis- 
courses, etc.  of  the  Twelve,  and  we  are  therefore  not  surprised 
to  find  that  1.  Peter,  1.  and  2.  John  (the  absence  of  3.  John 
may  be  due  to  chance),  as  well  as  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles 
as  treated  of  by  Luke,  were  valued  by  Irenaeus  as  highly  as 
Paul's  own  words.1     In  my  opinion,  Irenaeus  knew  the  Epistle 
of  James  and  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  but  not  as  component 
parts  of  Holy  Scripture  ;  he  treats  them  in  the  same  manner  as 
the  Pauline  Epistles  had  been  treated  forty  years  before.     On 
the  other  hand,  he  has  the  highest  possible  esteem  for  the  Apo- 
calypse, the  book  of  the  Apostle-Prophet.    Tertullian  proceeds 
in  much  the  same  way :  besides  the  thirteen  Pauline  Epistles, 
he  includes  in  the  Apostolic  '  instruments,'  the  Apocalypse,  the 
Acts,  1.  Peter,  1.  John  and  Jude.     The  addition  of  the  last- 
named  is  worthy  of  note,  and  the  absence  of  2.  and  3.  John  in 
Tertullian's  writings  is  not  absolutely  certain  evidence  of  their 
absence  from  his  Canon.     The  Epistle  of  James  is  uncertain  ; 
the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  he  once  quotes  expressly  as  an 
Epistle   of   Barnabas.2     All    trace   of   2.  Peter   is   wanting. 
Clement  of  Alexandria  includes  in  his  '  Apostolicum,'  the  Acts, 
fourteen  Epistles  of  Paul  (indeed  he  is  particularly  fond  of 
quoting  '  the  Apostle '  in  passages  from  Hebrews),  the  Apoca- 
lypse, and,  of  the   Catholic  Epistles,  undoubtedly  1.  Peter, 
1.  and  2.  John,  and  Jude.     According  to  Eusebius  (Historia 
Ecclesiastica,VI.  xiv.  1)  he  had  given  a  short  summary  of  all 
the  Catholic  Epistles — including,  therefore,  3.  John,  James 
and  2.  Peter — in  his  '  Outlines  '  (vTrorvrrwo-eis) ;  as  we  cannot 
however,  verify  the  correctness  of  this  report,  the  question 
must  remain  undecided.     But   the   fact   that   the  extensive 
writings  of  Clement  which  have  come  down  to  us  nowhere 
betray  any  acquaintance  with  these  three  Epistles,  seems  to 
me  very  remarkable  in  the  case  of  James  and  2.  Peter,  though 
in  that  of  3.  John  it  is  of  small  importance. 

Thus  we  see  that  the  three  great  men  of  the  Graeco-Latin 

E.g.,  III.  xiv.  xv.  2  De  Piidic.  20. 

K  K  2 


500      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

Church,  about  200  A.D.,  agree  to  include  in  the  second  part  of 
the  New  Testament,  thirteen  Epistles  of  Paul,  1.  Peter  and 
1.  John,  the  Acts  and  the  Apocalypse.  The  opinion  as  to  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  and  the  five  other  Catholic  Epistles — 
so  far  as  they  were  known  at  all — remained  undecided  even 
in  the  principal  communities.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
decision  as  to  the  rejection  of  books  which  were  cast  out  later 
on  as  Apocryphal  was  also  extremely  variable.  Irenaeus  l  is 
certainly  very  fond  of  mentioning  the  Scripture  (l/cavwrdrrj 
ypafiri)  of  Clement  of  Rome  2 ;  Hernias  is  introduced3  by  the 
words  KCL\.W$  SLTTSV  77  ypa(f)rj  r/  \sjovaa,  in  the  midst  of 
quotations  from  Genesis,  Malachi,  Ephesians  and  Matthew  ; 
and  this  is  not  the  only  evidence  of  the  high  esteem  in 
which  the  Roman  Apocalypse  was  held  ;  Tertullian,  too,' 
recognises  the  Scriptural  authority  of  *  that  Hernias  whose 
work  bears  the  title  of  "  The  Shepherd."  '  The  value  of  this 
older  testimony  is  not  lessened  by  the  fact  that  when  he  after- 
wards became  a  Montanist,  he  mocked  at  the  '  Shepherd  who 
only  loved  adulterers '  ;  his  change  of  opinion  only  shows  that 
dogmatic  considerations  were  more  effective  than  historical  in 
the  settlement  of  the  Canon.  Clement  of  Alexandria  refers 
still  more  frequently  to  Hermas,  and  also  to  the  Epistle  of 
Barnabas,  1.  Clement  and  the  '  Teaching  of  the  Apostles.' 
Moreover,  certain  *  Apocryphal '  sayings  of  the  Lord  and  of 
the  Apostles  are  to  be  found  in  his  writings.  But  considering 
his  wide  range  and  his  unexacting  standard,  we  must  not  con- 
clude too  hastily,  from  his  own  individual  inclination  towards 
the  most  comprehensive  use  possible  of  everything  valuable 
in  the  tradition,  that  such  was  also  the  custom  of  his  church, 
whether  that  of  Alexandria  or  of  Palestine.  Be  that  as  it 
may,  several  of  the  above-mentioned  works,  besides  Hermas, 
were  read  aloud  in  the  services  of  the  Church  about  200  A.D., 
without  any  clear  line  of  distinction  being  drawn  between 
them  and  the  writings  of  the  Apostles. 

6.  We  have  still  one  more  witness  (although  an  anony- 
mous one)  as  to  the  position  of  the  new  Canon  about  200, 
the  only  one  to  treat  of  this  subject  ex  officio.  This  is  the 


1  III.  iii.  3. 
8  IV.  xx.  2. 


2  1.  Clem. 

4  De  Oral.  xvi. 


§  37.]  THE    FACTS    OF    THE    CASE  501 

Muratorianum  (or  Canon  of  Muratori ]).  In  1740  the  Milanese 
librarian  L.  A.  Muratori  -  published  a  fragment,  eighty-live 
lines  long  (each  line  consisting  of  about  thirteen  or  fourteen 
syllables)  and  written  in  barbarous  Latin,  of  a  Codex  embra- 
cing a  number  of  documents,  with  hermeneutic  glosses,  dating 
from  about  the  year  700,  and  formerly  in  the  possession  of  the 
Monastery  of  Bobbio.  The  conclusion  was  illegible ;  it  began 
in  the  middle  of  a  sentence  relating  to  Mark  ;  most  probably 
this  was  preceded  by  a  discussion  of  the  Old  Testament  Books, 
and  what  has  come  down  to  us  is  perhaps  scarcely  a  third  of 
the  whole  list  of  Holy  Scriptures  which  it  contained.  Many 
still  deny  that  what  we  have  is  a  translation  from  a  Greek 
original ;  but  so  much  is  certain :  the  treatise  was  written 
about  200,  rather  a  decade  earlier  than  later ;  and  the  author 
(about  whose  name  it  is  useless  to  trouble  ourselves)  stood, 
in  some  connection  at  least,  with  the  Koman  church.  For 
instance,  he  says  of  the  '  Shepherd '  of  Hermas 3  that  it  was 
'  written  by  Hermas  quite  a  short  time  ago,  in  our  days,  in 
the  city  of  Kome,  when  his  brother,  Bishop  Pius,  sat  in  the 
Chair  of  the  church  at  Borne.'  At  a  distance  men  would 
scarcely  have  reckoned  by  the  dates  of  Koman  bishops— and 
even  if  we  consider  that  the  words  '  nuperrime  nostris  tempo- 
ribus,'  were  intended  to  mark  the  contrast  with  the  Apostolic 
times,  we  cannot  allow  too  great  an  interval  between  the 
Pontificate  of  Pius  (c.  140-155)  and  the  date  of  our  fragment. 
Now  this  Roman  included  in  his  Canon  Matthew,  Mark,  Luke 
and  John,  though  the  section  referring  to  Matthew  is  now 
wanting.  The  Gospels  form  one  group  for  discussion  by  them- 
selves ;  then  follow  '  Acta  omnium  Apostolorum  sub  uno  libro 
scripta,'  the  PaulineEpistles  (nine  to  the  churches,  and  four  to 
individuals),  Jude,  1.  and  2.  John,  the  Apocalypse  of  John  and 
the  Apocalypse  of  Peter,  to  which  indeed  is  added  the  remark 
that '  some  of  our  brethren  will  not  have  it  read  in  their  churches.' 
1.  Peter  can  scarcely  be  absent  from  the  list  except  by  an  over- 
sight, perhaps  that  of  a  copyist ;  the  fact  that  only  two  Epistles 
of  John  are  mentioned,  to  some  extent  lends  additional  impor- 
tance to  the  absence  of  quotations  from  3.  John  in  other  authors, 

1  See  the  text  in  Preuschen,  p.  459  above.  2  1 1750. 

3  Lines  73-80. 


502      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

such  as  Irenaeus  ;  but  what  constitutes  the  chief  value  of  the 
Muratorian  Fragment  is  that  it  places  the  following  statement 
beyond  controversy  :  the  great  churches  of  the  West,  about 
the  year  200,  possessed,  beside  the  Old,  a  New  Testament, 
the  first  part  of  which  consisted  of  the  Four  Gospels,  and 
the  second  of  the  Apostolic  writings  ;  and  among  these  last 
neither  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,2.Peter  nor  James  are  to 
be  found.  Other  writings  were  still  matter  for  controversy, 
as,  for  instance,  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter  ;  evidently  the  case  is 
exactly  the  same  with  the  '  Shepherd '  of  Hermas,  only  that 
our  fragmentist  belongs  to  the  party  who  rejected  it ;  and  when 
he  protests  so  energetically  against  the  forged  compositions 
of  heretics,  such  as  the  pretended  Epistles  of  Paul  to  the 
Laodiceans  and  to  the  Alexandrians,  he  was  no  doubt  driven 
to  do  so  by  the  partial  success  of  these  fictions  within  the 
orthodox  churches.  The  Muratorianum  no  longer  had  need  to 
combat  false  Gospels  in  its  own  district ;  the  only  uncertainty 
is  with  regard  to  the  limits  of  the  '  Apostolicum '  and  of  the 
Old  Testament,  for  it  defends  (and  in  a  truly  remarkable 
passage)  the  admission  of  the  '  Wisdom  of  Solomon.' 

If,  then,  the  result  which  we  had  already  obtained  con- 
cerning the  compass  of  the  New  Testament  Canon  is  most 
happily  confirmed  by  the  Muratorianum,  that  result  may  still 
prove  useful  to  us  as  a  guide  when  we  attempt  to  answer  the 
next  question  :  From  what  motives,  and  on  what  principles, 
did  the  Church  create  a  new  Canon  and  arrange  it  in  this 
particular  form  ? 

§  88.  The  Motives 

1.  An  utterance  of  Theodoretus T  shows  admirably  ho\? 
the  great  theologians  of  the  later  Church  imagined  the  Canon 
to  have  come  into  being.  He  invites  the  opponents  of  his 
allegorical  interpretation  of  Solomon's  Song  (according  to 
which  the  Song  treats  symbolically  of  purely  religious 
themes)  to  consider  how  much  wiser  and  more  spiritual  than 
they  were  the  holy  fathers  who  added  this  book  to  the 
Divine  Scriptures,  canonised  it  as  a  work  of  the  Holy  Spirit, 

1  See  p.  494. 


§  38.]  THE    MOTIVES  503 

and  recognised  it  as  suitable  for  the  Church ;  for  on  no  other 
basis  would  they  have  numbered  it  with  the  Holy  Scriptures. 
A  remark  of  Origen  on  [the  Prologue  of  Luke  fully  agrees 
with  this :  *  As  in  the  Old  Covenant  the  Charisma  of  dis- 
tinguishing betweenJSpirits  prevailed,  so  now  in  the  New 
Covenant  many  have  desired  to  write  the  Gospels,  but  the 
"  good  bankers  "  have  not  accepted  l  all,  but  have  chosen 
some  from  among  them  .  .  . ;  the  Church  of  God  gives 
the  preference  to  four  only.'  Men  are  thus  already  conscious 
that  the  Canon,  the  whole  body  of  Divine  Scriptures,  was  the 
outcome  of  a  selective  process,  and  that  the  Church,  or  rather 
the  Holy  Fathers,  the  great  leaders  and  teachers  of  the  Church, 
had  decided  on  the  selection.  This  view  is  not  only  ancient, 
it  is  in  part  correct.  The  New  Testament  Canon,  in  its  founda- 
tion as  in  its  final  form,  is  the  work  of  the  Catholic  Church ; 
and  since  the  Church  existed  only  in  men,  and  acted  only 
through  men,  this  meant  the  bishops  and  theologians  of  the 
second,  third  and  fourth  centuries.  Nor  must  the  influence 
of  individual  personalities  upon  the  process  be  underrated  ; 
although  the  disposition  and  custom  of  a  community  had 
always  to  be  considered,  the  decision  lay,  as  a  rule,  with  the 
official  head  of  that  community,  especially  in  the  case  of 
the  admission  of  fresh  books.  It  stands  to  reason  that 
in  this  matter  a  community  would  often  conform  to  a 
praiseworthy  custom  prevailing  in  a  neighbouring  church. 
Nevertheless,  such  a  far-reaching  uniformity  of  selection 
during  the  rapid  development  of  the  Canon  between  the  years 
140  and  200  would  be  inexplicable  (since  it  is  quite  certain 
that  nothing  like  a  compact  was  made  between  these  later 
'men  of  repute'),  if  the  general  conditions  had  not  forced 
the  decision  everywhere  to  follow  the  same  lines,  and  if  the 
point  of  view  in  the  matter  of  canonisation  had  not  been  the 
same  in  one  place  as  in  another.  No  one  about  the  year  170 
would  have  added  a  book  to  the  Divine  Scriptures  simply 
because  he  liked  it  and  because  it  appeared  to  be  edifying  and 
blameless  in  its  teaching.  Certain  conditions  were  indis- 
pensable :  it  must  possess  certain  essential  qualities  if  the 
question  of  its  admission  was  even  to  be  raised,  and  a 

:  Ambrose  translates  '  probarunt ; '  Jerome,  '  non  omnes  recepti.' 


504      AX    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

knowledge  of  these  qualities  depends  on  our  knowledge  of 
the  motives  which  induced  the  Church  just  at  that  time  to 
create  a  new  Canon.  Let  us  see  whether  the  first  witnesses 
to  the  Canon  themselves  possessed  such  a  knowledge. 

2.  The  author  of  the  Muratorianum  was  not  blind  to 
certain  differences  between  the  Four  Gospels,  and  does  not 
pass  over  the  fact  that  all  the  Evangelists  could  not  report 
as  eye-witnesses  ;  but  for  the  faith  of  believers  he  regarded 
these  differences  as  of  no  consequence,  since  the  great  facts 
of  the  history  of  salvation  were  imparted  fully  in  all  of 
them,  by  the  one  authoritative  spirit  ('  uno  ac  principal! 
spiritu  declarata '),  and  the  contents  of  all,  including  Mark 
and  Luke,  were  vouched  for  throughout  by  one  or  other  of  the 
Apostles.  As  regards  John's  Gospel,  the  fact  that  he  had  been 
induced  to  compose  it  by  the  wishes  of  his  fellow  disciples  and 
bishops,  and  had  undertaken  it  in  consequence  of  a  special  reve- 
lation to  Andrew,  was  a  very  welcome  '  donum  superadditum.' 
Great  weight  is  also  laid  on  the  self-testimony  of  the  Apostle 
in  the  First  Epistle  (i.  1-4)  where  he  speaks  of  himself  as 
visor,  auditor  and  scrip  tor  of  all  the  wonderful  works  of  God. 
Luke,  in  the  Acts,  limited  himself  strictly  to  the  narration 
of  what  came  within  his  own  experience  ;  it  was  for  this 
reason  that  he  was  silent,  for  instance,  as  to  the  martyrdom 
of  Peter,  and  the  journey  of  Paul  to  Spain.  The  Pauline 
Epistles,  from  1.  Corinthians  to  Romans,  were  addressed  in 
the  first  instance  to  seven  separate  communities,  but  were 
intended  for  the  Catholic  Church  scattered  all  over  the 
world,  just  as  John  in  the  Apocalypse  1  used  the  number  of 
the  Seven  Churches  as  a  symbol  of  the  perfect  whole.  The 
four  Epistles  to  Philemon,  Titus  and  Timothy  could  not 
be  included  in  this  category  :  they  had  been  declared  sacred 
in  the  Catholic  Church,  in  spite  of  their  private  character,  on 
account  of  their  precepts  as  to  ecclesiastical  discipline.  Pseudo- 
Pauline  epistles,  coloured  by  the  doctrines  of  Marcion  and 
others,  could  not  be  accepted  in  the  Church  any  more  than 
gall  could  be  mingled  with  honey.  Nothing  whatever  is  said 
as  to  the  contents  or  the  status  of  the  Catholic  Epistles  or 
the  Apocalypse.  The  most  interesting  part,  however,  is  the 

1  Chap.  ii.  fol. 


§  .88.]  THE    MOTIVKS  505 

discussion  concerning  Hernias.  His  work  should  certainly  be 
read  (this  evidently  does  not  mean  read  aloud,  for  there  is 
now  no  distinction  between  Anagnoxi*  in  public  worship  L  and 
canonisation ;  the  Muratorianum  only  testifies  that  there 
was  no  doubt  about  the  orthodoxy  and  usefulness  of  this 
'  Revelation  '),  but  it  must  not  be  proclaimed  before  the 
people  in  church;  there  was  no  room  for  Hermas  either 
among  the  Prophets,  whose  number  had  long  been  complete, 
or  among  the  Apostles  of  the  latter  days,  since  he  came  long 
after  the  age  of  the  Apostles.  What  the  fragmentist  adds 2 
about  the  books  of  Valentine,  about  a  new  psalm-book  of 
the  Marcionites  and  the  like,  is  only  intended  to  draw  a 
sharp  distinction  between  the  Canon  of  the  Universal,  the 
Catholic  Church,  and  that  which  held  canonical  rank  in  other 
communities,  Christian  only  in  name. 

How  far  the  unknown  author  here  sets  forth  his  own 
ideas  must  remain  uncertain  :  in  any  case,  he  is  influenced 
by  the  desire,  not  only,  by  drawing  up  a  list  of  Canonical 
books,  to  state  the  point  of  view  of  his  community  with 
regard  to  them,  but  also  to  defend  that  view  and  to  advance 
reasons  for  the  choice  it  had  made.  The  attempt  was  not 
brilliantly  successful,  and  it  may  be  said  of  the  Muratorianum 
that  in  it  the  principle  followed  by  the  Church  in  the  establish- 
ment of  the  new  Canon  is  represented  as  the  very  absence  of 
principle.  From  the  remarks  about  Hermas  we  may  conclude 
—and  this  is  at  bottom  the  author's  standpoint — that  in  his 
opinion  only  the  writings  of  Prophets  and  Apostles  could  claim 
a  reception  by  the  Church  ;  when  he  speaks  of  the  Apostles 
1  of  the  last  times,'  when  he  applies  the  words  '  completum 
numero '  to  the  Prophets,  his  qualifying  phrases  are  levelled 
against  the  Montanists  and  their  vaunts  of  the  new  Prophecy, 
and  imply  that  the  number  of  canonical  books  admitted  of  no 
increase  ;  the  Prophets  to  whom  the  Church  listened  were  even 
older  than  the  Apostles,  who  signified  the  finis  temporum,  the 
definite  end.  Consequently  Apocalypses  of  Christian  times 
were  not  accepted  merely  because  their  authors  were  prophets, 
but  only  if  they  were  Apostles  :  hence  the  Apocalypses  of 
John  and  Peter  alone  are  admitted.  The  fundamental 

1  'Legi  in  ecclesia.'  2  Lines  81  fol. 


506       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

condition  for   the  admission   of   a   document   into  the  New 
Testament  seems  to  be  that  it  should  be  of  Apostolic  origin. 

It  was  already  well  known,  however,  that  many  writings 
laid  false  claim  to  Apostolic  rank,  such  as  the  pseudo-Pauline 
Epistles  to  Laodicea  and  Alexandria  ;  nor  was  it  historical 
criticism  which  established  their  spuriousness  :  their  heretical 
contents  betrayed  them.  And  the  Church,  naturally,  would 
not  tolerate  pseudo-Apostolic  writings.  But  how  then  could 
she  approve  of  the  pseudo-  '  Wisdom  of  Solomon  '  ?  True, 
there  was  nothing  to  object  to  in  its  contents,  no  taint  of 
Marcionite  poison ;  but  if  the  contents  and  not  the  person 
of  the  writer  were  to  set  the  standard,  the  whole  argument 
concerning  the  orthodox  Hermas,  who  was  perhaps  a  friend 
of  Paul — a  man  of  the  Apostolic  times— falls  to  the  ground. 
Again,  Luke,  the  Acts  and  Mark  are  actually  counted  among 
the  Holy  Scriptures,  although  the  author  in  each  case  was 
not  an  Apostle,  not  even  an  eye-witness  for  the  contents  of 
the  Gospel,  but  only  a  collector  from  unknown  sources  (prout 
assequi  potuit).  And,  on  the  other  hand,  the  equation  Apo- 
stolic =  Canonical  appears  not  yet  to  be  a  matter  of  course  with 
the  author  of  the  Muratorianum.  This  writer  can  only  justify 
the  reception  through  the  whole  Catholic  Church  of  epistles 
written  by  Paul  to  individual  communities  by  a  piece  of  half 
arithmetical,  half  theosophical juggling;  still  less,  then,  could 
the  letters  of  the  Apostle  addressed  to  individual  persons 
belong  to  the  Church,  save  for  the  fact  that  their  contents 
referred  to  matters  of  ecclesiastical  organisation.  Private 
utterances  of  an  Apostle,  therefore,  had  nothing  to  do  with  the 
Canon.  But  again,  did  not  Luke  dedicate  the  Acts  to  the 
most  excellent  Theophilus,  as  Paul  had  dedicated  an  epistle  to 
Philemon  ?  And  as  far  as  the  knowledge  of  the  Muratori- 
anum goes,  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter  was  not  attacked  as  non- 
Apostolic  ;  yet,  in  spite  of  this,  many  Catholics  refused  to  have 
it  read  aloud  in  their  churches.  How,  then,  do  these  Apostoli 
in  finem  temporum,  who  stand  beside  the  ancient  Prophets, 
look  now  ?  A  motley  gathering  :  Apostles  and  their  disciples, 
writings  addressed  to  the  world  and  to  individuals  ;  while,  on 
the  other  hand,  books  bearing  an  unimpeachable  Apostolic 
stamp  are  left,  perhaps,  outside  the  Canon. 


§  38.]  THE   MOTIVES  507 

3.  The  same  result  is  obtained  by  a  study  of  the  writings 
of  well-known  Doctors  of  the  Church,  such  as  ^Irenaeus, 
Tertullian  and  Clement,  who  were  contemporary  with  the 
Muratorianum.  The  Church  is  founded  on  the  Apostles,  and 
through  the  unbroken  succession  of  her  bishops  (this  is  a 
favourite  idea  in  the  Western  Church)  her  inheritance  is  pre- 
served from  corruption :  she  scarcely  needed  a  written  Canon 
when  she  possessed  so  unassailable  a  tradition ;  but  it  was 
well  that  a  comparison  of  the  teaching  and  ordinances  of  the 
Church  with  the  records  of  Apostolic  preaching  should  demon- 
strate the  identity  of  the  original  with  the  later  Christianity. 
It  was  the  Apostles  who  connected  the  Church  with  Christ ; 
their  works  were  the  guarantee  for  the  Christianity — that  is 
to  say,  the  Divinity— of  all  that  pertained  to  the  Church.  It 
had  long  been  impossible  to  imagine  any  antagonism  between 
the  Apostles,  just  as  it  would  have  been  impossible  to  conceive 
an  antagonism  between  a  saying  of  Christ  and  a  saying  of  an 
Apostle.  The  Apostles  being  dead,  they  had  left  behind  them 
in  their  writings  a  substitute  for  oral  preaching,  as  the  founda- 
tion and  corner-stone  of  the  faith.  The  Spirit  of  God,  which 
dwelt  continually  in  those  Apostles  endowed  with  the  po  test  as 
evangelii,  spoke  in  their  writings,  and  these,  therefore,  con- 
tained the  unerring  truth,  whether  they  told  the  story  of  Jesus, 
or  warned  the  flock  against  false  doctrine,  or  gave  counsel  as 
to  the  ordering  of  the  Church.  Such  a  chain  of  thought  is 
familiar  to  all  the  Fathers  of  the  Church  from  Irenaeus 
onwards  ;  we  might  therefore  expect  the  idea  :  as  all  that 
the  Prophets  wrote  forms  the  Old  Testament,  so  all  that  the 
Apostles  left  behind  them  in  writing  forms  the  compass  of 
the  New.  But  no :  we  do  not  attain  to  so  clear  and  uniform  a 
definition  of  the  qualities  which  fitted  a  book  for  admission 
into  the  Canon ;  now  it  seems  to  be  the  absolute  trust- 
worthiness of  an  eye-witness,  or  even  of  the  disciple  of  such 
a  one ;  now  a  specific  Apostolic  charisma,  with  which,  how- 
ever, Mark  and  Luke  could  not  properly  be  credited ;  now— 
in  order  to  satisfy  possible  doubts — a  complete  agreement 
with  the  universally  acknowledged  tradition.  The  question 
as  to  whether  the  Canon  included  everything  recorded  by 
the  Apostles,  and  whether  all  was  made  equal  use  of,  the 


508       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

compilers  did  not  even  venture  to  raise,  while  writings  of 
obviously  later  origin,  such  as  Hermas  at  least,  are  treated 
with  almost  the  same  reverence  as  the  Apostolic.  Hence 
it  follows  that  all  reasoning  as  to  the  conditions  of  canonisa- 
tion—the statement  of  principle— only  came  later,  when  the 
object  which  was  to  be  denned  was  already  in  being  ;  it  was 
not  till  men  already  possessed  a  New  Testament  that  they 
began  to  consider  why  they  had  it  in  precisely  that  form. 
The  Church  created  the  new  Canon  unconsciously,  not  ac- 
cording to  any  principles.  Indeed,  one  might  even  say  that 
it  was  shaped  in  that  state  of  super-consciousness  in  which 
all  the  fruits  of  genius  grow  and  ripen,  nor  can  we  expect 
to  be  admitted  into  the  secret  workings '  of  this  creation 
by  the  teachers  of  the  Church.  None  of  the  men  of  that 
time  could  have  told  us  why  the  New  Testament  made  its 
appearance  just  then,  with  such  rapidity  and  in  that  parti- 
cular form,  or  rather  compass ;  for  they  never  suspected  the 
part  that  they  played  themselves  in  the  great  onward  move- 
ment, and  at  the  best  only  made  fair  terms  with  the  accom- 
plished fact ;  we,  surveying  all  the  factors  concerned  from  the 
vantage-ground  of  distance,  can  solve  the  enigma  more 
accurately  than  they. 

4.  A  new  religion,  such  as,  in  spite  of  its  close  connection 
with  the  Old  Testament,  Christianity  was,  could  not  be  per- 
manently content  with  the  Canon  of  the  old  religion — which, 
moreover,  it  could  have  dispensed  with  more  easily  at  first 
than  later.  Some  witness  to  its  own  spirit,  some  record  of  the 
new  covenant,  some  authentic  revelation  of  perfect  piety  was 
needed,  if  only  to  derive  from  it  the  real  Christian  inter- 
pretation of  the  old  *  Scriptures,'  or  to  attest  them  anew. 
Such  a  necessity  is  usually  most  pressing  when  religious 
fertility  begins  to  fail.  So  long  as  men  had  Jesus  and  his 
Apostles,  so  long  as  in  every  community  there  were  prophets 
and  teachers  to  picture  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  and  to  repeat 
the  Gospel,  no  one  thought  of  such  things  as  New  Testament 
Books  ;  when  the  first  enthusiasm  was  over,  when  speakers 
were  often  lacking,  and  there  were  none  whose  authority 
in  questions  of  life  and  learning  !  could  be  considered  in- 

1  See  1.  Clem. 


§  38.]  Til  1C    MOT1VKS  509 

contestable,  on  whom  the  Spirit  of  God  undoubtedly  rested 
—then  compensation  was  sought  in  the  fragments  remaining 
from  an  earlier  and  a  richer  time.     The  more  keen  the  feeling 
of  the  present  poverty,  the  stronger  would  be  the  inclination 
to  idealise  the  past,  to  retain  at  least  what  still  remained  in 
written  form  of  the  treasures  of  that  earlier  generation,  to 
judge  everything  new  by  those  treasures,  and  to  raise  them 
to  the  position  of  a  standard — a  Canon.     If  men  perceived 
that  they  received  a  keener  stimulus,  a  quicker  kindling  of 
faith  and  hope,  from  these  early  Christian  writings  than  even 
from  the  songs  of  David  or  the  eloquence  of  Isaiah — not  to 
mention  the  poor  rhetoric  of  the  contemporary  teachers — it 
followed  inevitably  that  the  '  new '  books  should  be  ranked 
with  the  *  old.'      There  is  some  truth   in   the   saying  that 
the  hymn-book  is  the  Bible  of  the  common  people  ;  at  certain 
times  and  in  certain  circles  the  religious  life  of  the  world 
has  in  truth  been  far  more  strongly  influenced  by  Luther's 
writings,  by  the '  Augustana,'  by  Spener's  and  Scriver's  edifying 
works,  or  by  Irving's  tractates,  than  by  all  the  Books  of  the 
Bible  put  together :  they,  too,  might  have  been  canonised  and 
declared  sacred,  if  a  dogma  had  not  stood  in  the  way,  the 
dogma — maintained   by   the  very   men   who   received   such 
enthusiastic  veneration — of  the  sole  authority  of  the  Old  and 
New  Testaments.     Now,  the  Lutherans  of  about  1650,  or  a 
genuine   pietist  of  1760,  or   even  an  enthusiast   of   to-day, 
can  forego  the  canonisation  of  their  favourite  books,  because 
they  are   convinced   that   these  books  only  paraphrase  the 
contents  of  the  Bible,  that  it  is  there  that  they  will  find  the 
truth  and  the  Lord,  on  whom  all  depends  ;    but  in  150  it 
would   have  been  very  much  more  difficult  for  a  Christian 
to  console  himself  with  the  Old  Testament.     Only  by  means 
of  the  artifices  of  a  trained  exegesis  did  the  theologian  find 
all  that  the  era  of  fulfilment  had  brought,  foretold  and  pre- 
figured   in    the    Old    Testament ;    for    the   multitude     this 
nourishment  was  not  sufficient:  they  did  not  wish  to  dig  and 
delve,  but  to  see  and    hear.     And  the  richer  in  thought  a 
religion  is — the  more  it  lays  claim  to  a  perfect  grasp  of  the 
truth — the  more  indispensable  it  is,  as  soon  as  the  substance 
of  this  truth  is  fixed  and  systematised  in  detail,  to  possess 


510      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

what  is  peculiar  to  it  in  unequivocal,  norm-giving  records  ;  a 
Christian  Church  permanently  satisfied  with  the  sacred  books 
of  Judaism  would  have  been  a  monstrosity  in  the  history  of 
religion. 

To   ask   when   the  establishment   of   a    Canon  was  first 
thought  of,  is  to  ask  when  the  need  for  authority,  the  feeling  of 
dependence  on  those  who  went  before,  outweighed  the  first 
fresh   consciousness    of   power :    that   this   point   is   almost 
reached  as  early  as  the  second  generation  after  the  Apostles 
does  not  seem  to  me  at  all  astonishing,  considering  the  spread 
of  the  new  faith  in  districts  which  were  sometimes  not  in  the 
least  prepared  for  it ;  nor  must  the  influence  which  Gnosti- 
cism and  Montanism  had  upon  the  process  be  exaggerated. 
Naturally,  a  religious  community  that  has  to  pass  through 
great  internal  confusion  has  much  more  need  to  prove  its 
rights  by  what  may  be  called  legal  means,  by  documents  which 
even  its  opponents  must  recognise,  than  a  Church  that  lives 
in  peace  and  unity  ;  and  since  only  God  can  decide  in  matters 
of  religion,  every  document  must  be  traced  back  to  God.     But 
such  strife  would  not  have  been  spared  the  Christian  Church 
even   without   Gnosticism   and   the   Phrygian  prophets.     If 
there  had  never  been  a  Gnostic,  the  Christian  books  for  public 
reading  of  about  the  year  100  would  probably  have  become 
sacred  before  200,  sharing  the  infallibility  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment, because  both  the  feelings  of  the  layman  and  the  brain 
of  the  theologian  in  reality  placed  the  former  before  the  latter. 
The  dispute  between  the  Church  and  the  Gnostics  had  only 
the  special  effect  of  making  the  former  more  careful  in  the 
business  of  changing  her  favourite  writings  into  Divine  Books, 
and  of  confining  her  very  soon  to  those  which  were  absolutely 
unassailable  and  especially  fitted  to  form  the  foundation  of 
doctrine  ;  that  between  the  Church  and  Montanism  resulted  in 
an  imperative  demand  for  the  one  true  mark  of  the  primitive 
— i.e.  Apostolic  origin — and  in  a  withdrawal  of  favour  from 
books  of  an  apocalyptic  character.     It  is  true  that  another 
interest  worked  in  the  same  direction,  that  of  the  defenders  of 
the  new  faith  before  the  State  and  Gentile  culture.    It  can  be  no 
mere  chance  that  the  first  trace  of  a  New  Testament  appears, 
of  all  writers,  in  Justin,  the  Apologist  of  Christianity  before 


§  38.]  THE   MOTIVKS  511 

the  Emperor  and  the  Senate.  The  man  who  sought  to  teach 
the  jealous  enemies  of  the  new  religion  what  it  and  its  aims 
actually  were,  could  not  refer  them  to  Jewish  books  alone  as 
the  final  sources  of  knowledge,  nor,  on  the  other  hand,  to  all 
that  had  ever  been  written  under  the  banner  of  Christianity, 
for  that  would  have  been  to  give  away  his  own  cause, 
especially  at  a  time  when  Gnosticism  was  flourishing.  It 
was  therefore  the  best  policy  to  bring  forward  very  little  as 
authentic,  but  that  little  such  as  every  Christian  must  be 
proud  of,  and  such  as  stood  in  immediate  relationship  with 
the  highest  Christian  authorities. 

5.  Thus  the  stage  of  sanctification  followed  that  of  regular 
reading  in  the  services  of  the  Church,  and  how  the  transition 
between  these  two  conceptions  was  brought  about  we  can  easily 
perceive  from  the  Muratorianum.  But  surely,  not  all  the  books 
thus  used  from  the  beginning  finally  passed  into  the  Canon  ? 
On  this  point  it  is  usual  to  speak  of  a  great  process  of  separa- 
tion, which,  when  certain  favourite  Christian  writings  were 
canonised,  crowded  out  a  great  number  of  others  from  the 
Church --devoured,  as  it  were,  a  host  of  victims.  There  is 
some  truth  in  this,  but  it  borders  on  exaggeration.  When 
the  new  Canon  grew  up  within  the  Church  from  the  year  140 
onwards,  the  Church  trod  down  many  a  flower  growing  closely 
around  it,  in  order  to  complete  the  process  of  enclosure.  A 
similar  process  had,  however,  gone  on  before,  when  the  books 
for  public  reading  were  handed  on  from  one  community  to 
another,  and  a  decision  had  to  be  made  for  or  against  any 
book  that  was  proffered  ;  for  most  communities  the  formation 
of  the  New  Testament  certainly  meant  an  increase  rather 
than  a  diminution  of  their  material  for  religious  instruction. 
Poverty  itself  had  preserved  them  from  obtaining  all  available 
Christian  writings  for  their  services,  and  even  at  a  much  later 
date  there  were  many  churches  well  aware  of  the  extent  of 
the  new  Canon,  but  not  possessing  copies  of  all  the  New  Testa- 
ment Books.  No  considerable  reduction  was  undertaken  in 
the  number  of  the  original  reading-books,  and  the  efforts 
necessary,  after  the  recognition  of  a  new  Canon,  to  enforce  the 
utmost  uniformity  as  to  its  contents  in  all  communities,  had 
long  ago — and  likewise  mainly  through  processes  of  completion 


512      AN   INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

and  enrichment — been  prepared  for  by  the  removal,  through 
the  lively  intercourse  maintained  between  the  communities,  of 
the  most  conspicuous  differences  in  their  usage.  The  irregu- 
larity of  the  boundary  lines  in  the  New  Testament  is  not  to  be 
denied — in  the  Old  Testament  it  needs  no  explanation,  for  there 
all  the  remains  of  Hebrew  national  literature  were  collected, 
while  the  New  Testament  represents  a  selection, — but  it  is  to  be 
explained  by  the  fact  that  selection  did  not  mean  the  rigorous 
exclusion  of  everytnihg  not  answering  to  a  fixed  standard ; 
on  the  contrary,  practically  everything  which  had  already 
been  established  and  approved  was  maintained,  and  only 
those  parts  let  go  which  absolutely  could  not  be  retained 
longer.  In  my  opinion,  the  selective  process  on  the  part  of 
the  Church  did  not  take  place— or  did  so  at  least  to  a  very 
limited  extent — contemporaneously  with  the  process  of  form- 
ing the  Canon.  The  rejection  and  admission  of  writings 
went  on  chiefly  at  the  time  when  the  primitive  form  of  our 
New  Testament  did  not  yet  exist.  The  unconscious  action 
of  the  canonisers  was  not  guided  by  the  motto  '  As  little  as 
possible,'  but  by  that  of  *  If  possible,  all '  of  that  which  had 
been  used  for  edification  in  the  worship  of  the  Church. 

As  far  as  we  may  venture  to  judge,  the  Church  admitted 
into  its  new  Canon  only  the  best  of  its  religious  literature  ; 
what  we  know  of  the  non-Canonical  Gospels — we  need  only 
indicate  the  newly  discovered  Gospel  of  Peter — with  their 
romantic  fancies  and  their  pompous,  dogmatic  tone,  cannot 
be  compared  with  the  Canonical  Gospels  in  their  .sublime 
simplicity  ;  and  the  Histories  of  the  Apostles  (such  as  the 
Acts  of  Paul)  which  followed  Luke's  are  in  proportion  almost 
more  pitiful.  What  a  contrast,  too,  between  the  prolixity  of 
the  First  Epistle  of  Clement,  or  the  theological  arguments  of 
the  Epistle  of  Barnabas,  and  the  directness  both  of  religious 
feeling  and  expression  in  the  Epistles  of  Paul,  in  1.  Peter  and 
1.  John  !  Indeed,  the  tact  with  which  the  early  Church  went 
to  work  in  creating  the  New  Testament  was  on  the  whole 
astonishing  ;  she  could  not  have  demonstrated  her  fitness  for 
such  a  task  more  brilliantly ;  but  our  admiration  is  due  in  a 
still  higher  degree  to  that  older  Church  which  chose  the 
books  for  public  reading,  and  left  little  room  beside  them 


§  38.]  THE   MOTIVES  513 

for  less  valuable  productions.  The  work  of  the  '  many '  who 
wrote  Gospels  besides  Mark  and  Matthew  was  not  destroyed 
by  an  act  of  violence  when  the  new  Canon  arose ;  it  had 
been  generally  approved  of  in  but  few  communities,  for  no 
*  Apocryphal '  Gospel  can  be  proved  to  have  enjoyed  any  con- 
siderable circulation.  No  doubt  the  attempt  was  made  to 
maintain  some  of  them,  but  they  could  not  long  hold  their 
ground  in  most  places  beside  one  or  other  of  those  which  after- 
wards became  the  Four  Gospels  par  excellence.  A  change  of 
taste  in  the  Church  must  be  admitted  in  the  case  of 
Apocalypses  only,  though  it  must  not  be  explained  solely  by  an 
anti-Montanistic  tendency.  To  the  claims  of  higher  culture 
this  class  of  writing,  most  examples  of  which  merely  contained 
Jewish  prophecies  in  a  more  or  less  Christian  dress,  appeared 
flat  and  vulgar,  and  only  provoked  sharp  criticism.  But  other- 
wise the  makers  of  the  New  Testament  Canon  did  not  work  in 
a  radical  spirit,  for  they  merely  changed  the  already  high 
authority  of  the  approved  books  into  the  highest  of  all. 

The  natural  consequence  of  this  was  a  growing  mistrust 
of  local  peculiarities  ;  the  question  as  to  whether  a  certain 
document  were  Divine  or  not  could  not  now  be  left,  like 
that  of  its  fitness  or  unfitness  for  public  reading,  to  the 
decision  of  individual  communities  ;  the  tendency  towards 
uniformity  was  necessarily  strengthened.  But  in  order  to  con- 
vince a  neighbouring  community  unwilling  to  give  up  doubtful 
customs  it  was  necessary  to  have  some  reasons ;  these,  again, 
required  reflection  as  to  the  advantages  of  the  right  books  over 
the  wrong  in  use  elsewhere ;  but  not  till  the  next  period  did  such 
reasoning  attain  any  important  influence  on  the  history  of  the 
Canon ;  the  original  Canon  was  essentially  a  codification 
and  legalisation  of  the  material  handed  down  by  tradition. 
After  a  while  the  Christian  literature  that  in  the  last  decades 
had  served  on  Sundays  for  the  edification  of  the  leading 
communities — where,  as  we  have  seen,  the  new  Canon  arose  in 
two  main  divisions — was  treated  as  Divine  Scripture,  and 
designated  as  such ;  and  the  other  communities,  already  pre- 
pared for  the  most  part  to  follow  the  example  of  the  greater, 
were  induced,  with  more  or  less  rapid  success,  to  join  them  in 
this  practice.  There  was  never  a  time,  however,  in  the  history 

L  L 


514      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

of  the  Books  of  the  New  Testament,  when  individual  conces- 
sions were  not  made  to  considerations  of  policy.  Hermas,  for 
instance,  could  be  given  up  (as  in  the  Muratorianum),  although 
he  had  till  then  been  read  in  the  churches  as  frequently  as 
the  Apocalpyse.  His  existence  in  the  Canon  made  it  too 
difficult  to  exclude  other  dangerous  writings  which  forced 
themselves  forward — though  Irenaeus,  Tertullian  and  Clement 
did  not  so  much  as  perceive  this  difficulty. 

6.  Let  us  now  attempt  to  present  a  definite  outline  of  the 
rise  of  our  Canon  in  the  first  and  second  centuries. 

In  the  eyes  of  believers  '  The  Lord  '  and  his  word  were  from 
the  first  the  ultimate  Court  of  Appeal.  Most  men,  it  is  true,  had 
knowledge  of  him  only  from  the  narratives  of  others,  and  the 
corruption  which  was  to  be  feared  from  this  method  of  propa- 
gation was  avoided  from  about  65  onwards  by  the  preservation 
in  writing  of  his  most  important  sayings.  Before  long  the 
number  of  those  who  had  received  the  words  of  Jesus  directly 
from  his  actual  hearers  grew  less  and  less,  but  Papias,  assisted 
by  his  age,  his  good  fortune,  his  numerous  connections  with 
the  centres  of  Christian  life  and  his  industry  in  collection, 
was  successful  in  making  many  a  valuable  discovery  unattained 
by  those  who  possessed  written  Gospels.  Most  of  the  com- 
munities of  that  period  would  have  learnt  very  little  about 
Jesus  if  they  had  followed  Papias 's  example  in  preferring  oral 
to  written  tradition  ;  if  the  latter  had  been  strictly  excluded 
they  would  scarcely  have  known  more  than  we  should  now  know 
of  the  Seven  Years'  War  if  no  written  records  of  it  existed. 
The  only  course  open  to  them  was  to  read  aloud  the  history 
of  the  Lord  from  the  writings  of  Matthew,  Mark,  or  any 
other  writer  available.  At  first  a  distinction  was  drawn 
clearly  enough  between  the  '  most  holy  Word  '  of  the  Son 
of  God,  which  was  there  preserved  in  writing,  and  the  additions 
of  those  who  reported  that  Word  ;  but  it  was  impossible  to 
apportion  accurately  the  different  degrees  of  reverence  due  to 
what  was  read,  according  as  it  was  the  Lord  or  the  Evangelist 
who  spoke.  As  soon  as  the  written  word  of  Jesus  had 
assumed  the  holiest  place,  its  honours  must  soon  be  shared 
by  the  documents  which  contained  it.  In  the  long  run  it  was 
impossible  to  keep  the  book  and  its  contents  separate, 


§38.]  THE    MOTIVES  515 

especially  since  the  very  name  of  the  book,  '  evayye\iov,' 
made  such  a  separation  more  difficult.  The  first  genera- 
tion that  from  its  earliest  years  had  only  known  Jesus  in  the 
Church  from  written  Gospels,  must  simply,  unconscious  of  any 
change,  have  transferred  to  these  Gospels  the  extreme  reve- 
rence due  to  the  Word  of  the  Lord. 

The  opposition  of  those  who  agreed  with  Papias — an  oppo- 
sition raised  perhaps  in  view  of  the  differences  between  the 
Gospels — was  met  with  the  declaration  that  it  was  impossible 
to  be  more  sure  of  preserving  the  truth  about  Jesus  than  by 
holding  firmly  to  what  was  reported  of  him  by  his  Apostles, 
men  like  Matthew  and  John,  for  who  would  dare  to  impute 
ignorance  or  dishonesty  to  such  as  these  ?  If  others  pointed 
to  the  strange  heresies  which  certain  obscure  Gospels  (not  all 
of  them,  of  course)  had  with  evil  intent  invented  and  attached 
to  the  name  of  the  Lord,  this  only  made  it  the  more  necessary 
to  separate  the  dross  from  the  gold,  and  to  determine  where 
the  genuine,  true  tradition  about  the  Saviour  was  to  be  found. 
It  was  but  natural  that  the  Gospels  written  by  the  trusted 
friends  of  Jesus,  the  Apostles,  and  in  the  use  of  which  the 
Churches  had  so  long  been  blessed,  should  come  to  serve  as  a 
Canon ;  the  Apostles  had  been  charged  with  the  task  of 
preaching  the  Gospel  to  the  whole  creation,  and  surely  they 
had  fulfilled  this  task  to  the  satisfaction  of  their  Master. 
Other  favourite  Gospel  writings,  like  those  of  Mark  and  Luke, 
did  not  belong  to  this  particular  class,  but  here  a  compromise 
was  effected  between  reason  and  tradition  ;  since  their  rela- 
tionship with  those  which  possessed  full  Apostolic  dignity  was 
unmistakable,  it  was  possible,  by  a  little  exercise  of  skill,  to 
endow  them  with  indirect  Apostolicity  and  eye-witness-ship. 
So,  perhaps,  one  community  would  at  first  hold  Matthew  in 
high  esteem,  another  Luke,  another  both  of  them,  and  so  on  ; 
it  would  read  them  every  Sunday  and  entirely  forget  that  it 
had  ever  drawn  a  distinction  between  the  Word  of  the  Lord  as 
manifested  here,  and  the  Word  of  God  as  spoken  by  the 
Prophets  ;  elsewhere,  again,  the  same  thing  would  occur  in  the 
case  of  Gospels  which  are  now  lost ;  the  Gospel,  provided  only 
that  it  was  trustworthy,  obtained  in  fact  the  consideration  of 
-a  Holy  Scripture.  Now,  it  was  precisely  in  the  second  century 

L    L    2 


516       AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

that  all  sorts  of  doubtful  productions  of  this  kind  saw  the 
light — productions  not  only  emanating  from  Gnostic  circles, 
where  men  prided  themselves  on  a  secret  tradition,  but  also 
from  within  the  Church,  and  written  in  all  good  faith.  But 
the  great  majority  realised  the  contrast  between  the  ancient, 
well-attested  Gospels  and  these  new-fangled  publications. 
They  recognised  the  danger  they  portended  of  a  splitting-up 
of  the  Gospel  material,  and  now  consciously  renounced  the  use 
of  Gospels  whose  authors  could  not  be  proved  to  be  eye- 
witnesses, or  else  to  be  the  disciples,  interpreters  or  scribes  of 
an  eye-witness,  even  if  the  contents  gave  no  occasion  for 
suspicion.  The  first  and  immediate  success  obtained  by  our 
four  Gospels  on  their  appearance  in  the  large  communities, 
was  the  reason  why  in  forty  years'  time  they  had  become  the 
standard  by  which  all  other  Gospels  were  judged — and  why 
they  were  held  to  represent  the  one  Divine  and  well-authenti- 
cated Gospel. 

And  if  once  productions  of  Apostolic  authorship  were 
canonised  at  all,  the  way  was  opened  which  must  lead  to  the 
canonisation  of  all  Apostolic  writings.  If  the  Apostles  were 
recognised  in  those  narratives  as  unerring  witnesses  of  the 
preaching  of  Jesus,  how  could  their  other  writings,  composed 
for  the  service  of  the  Gospel,  be  held  more  lightly  ?  Are  we 
to  believe  that  what  Paul  wrote  to  Corinth  and  to  Rome, 
what  the  author  of  1.  John  introduced  so  solemnly  with  the 
words,  '  That  which  we  have  heard,  that  which  we  have  seen 
with  our  eyes  .  .  .  concerning  the  word  of  life  .  .  .  these 
things  we  write  that  our  joy  may  be  fulfilled  ' — that  all  this  did 
not  belong  to  the  Gospel  ?  It  was  simply  impossible  to  regard 
the  man  before  whose  mysterious  wisdom,  as  expressed  in 
the  prologue  to  the  Gospel,  men  bowed  with  awe,  as  being  in 
his  Epistle  merely  a  true  preacher  like  a  thousand  others, 
especially  since  men  were  accustomed  to  have  this  Epistle  read 
out  to  them  in  the  same  tones  and  from  the  same  place  as  the 
Gospel.  After  the  Gospel  Canon  had  arisen,  and  no  doubt  in 
connection  with  the  trustworthiness  of  the  Apostles,  on  which 
so  much  stress  was  laid  during  the  process,  a  larger  space 
than  before  was  probably  allotted  to  the  other  Apostolic- 
writings  in  the  common  worship  ;  on  all  sides  the  interest  in 


§38.]  THE    MOTJY  517 

them  became  more  lively,  in  part  because  their  readers  were 
convinced  that  with  their  help  they  could  beat  back  all  the 
attacks  of  heresy,  and  saw  the  historical  foundations  of  the 
Catholic  Church  secured  by  them  against  the  subjectivity  of 
Gnosticism  and  Montanism.  Step  by  step — though  there 
exists  no  evidence  of  this — they  rose  to  a  higher  place  in  the 
Anagnosis,  until  at  last  all  memory  had  faded  away  of  a 
distinction  between  the  Evangelistic  reading-books  which  had 
reached  Canonical  dignity  and  the  writings  of  the  Apostles. 
And  now  another  compromise  is  made  between  reason  and 
tradition ;  the  popular  Book  of  Acts  is  retained,  in  spite  of  the 
fact  that  it  was  not  written  by  an  Apostle — but  it  dealt,  after 
all,  with  the  words  and  actions  of  Apostles — and  in  many 
instances  Hernias,  1.  Clement  and  others  of  the  same  kind  also 
keep  their  place,  having  long  been  widely  known  in  close  con- 
nection with  the  Apostolic  writings.  The  '  Apostolicum '  was, 
in  fact,  a  plant  of  spontaneous  growth,  and  not  the  deliberate 
product  of  a  Parliamentary  Commission.  Even  if  we  had  no 
data  to  go  upon,  we  should  not  have  allowed  more  than  from 
thirty  to  fifty  years  for  the  transformation  of  the  Gospel  Canon 
into  the  Canon  of  all  the  Apostolic  writings.  The  first  genera- 
tion of  those  who  from  their  youth  up  had  heard  the  history 
and  letters  of  the  Apostles  regularly  read  aloud  in  the  worship  of 
the  Church,  side  by  side  with  their  Gospels,  who  were,  moreover, 
constantly  referred  in  the  sermons  they  heard  to  the  Apostles, 
as  the  representatives  of  Christ,  the  founders  and  leaders  of 
the  Church,  must  have  overthrown  the  barrier  which  separated 
the  Gospels  from  the  writings  of  the  Apostles.  Marcion  the 
Gnostic  had  instantly  drawn  the  inference  that  the  writings  of 
Paul,  the  man  who  stood  surety  for  the  genuine  Gospel  of 
Jesus,  could  not  be  treated  as  of  less  account  than  the  Gospel 
itself ;  in  the  Church  at  large  it  was  but  a  little  longer  before 
this  inference  was  also  drawn.  Which  community  first  felt 
the  necessity  of  so  doing  will  never  be  determined  ;  it  is 
certain  that  the  Koman  Church,  with  its  wide-spread  im- 
portance and  its  liking  for  settled  forms  and  fixed  authority, 
was  one  of  the  first  to  be  concerned  in  it. 

We  can  attempt  no  more  than  an  imaginary  reconstruc- 
tion of  the  first   decisive  epoch  of  the  history  of  the   New 


518      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  u. 

Testament  Canon  ;  but  it  ought  to  satisfy  the  facts  we  possess 
and  the  demands  of  internal  probability.  And  from  this  point 
onwards  the  march  of  events  is  clear.  The  process  of  canonisa- 
tion could  not  be  renewed  after  another  fifty  years  in  favour  of 
post-apostolic  literature,  and  so  on  again  and  again,  for  at  the 
same  time  that  the  Church  proclaimed  the  original  form  of  the 
new  Canon,  she  proclaimed  her  earliest  dogma,  that  of  the 
unique  quality  of  the  Apostolic  charisma,  which  must  for  ever 
bar  the  approach  to  productions  of  later  times.  '  The  Pro- 
phets and  the  Apostles  '  was  the  watchword  of  the  old  Catholic 
Church ;  to  them  all  truth  was  revealed,  and  they  had  seen 
to  it  that  in  their  writings  it  should  be  imparted  whole  and 
unimpaired  to  later  generations.  A  Church  could  not  recog- 
nise new  truths  ;  in  her  eyes  no  man  of  later  times  could  be 
more  highly  gifted  than  her  founders ;  it  would,  moreover, 
be  doing  them  shameful  injustice  to  believe  that  they  had 
kept  back  from  their  Church  any  portion  of  the  truth  they 
possessed.  So  the  Church  of  the  year  200  already  stood  fast 
in  the  sufficiency  of  the  revelation  manifested  in  the  Holy  Scrip- 
tures of  the  Old  Testament,  in  the  Gospels,  and  in  the  writings 
of  the  Apostles.  From  that  time  forward  there  was  but  one 
task  left :  to  do  away  with  the  differences  which  were  known 
to  exist  in  the  wide  circle  of  the  Church  regarding  the  number 
of  the  new  Canonical  Books,  and  to  carry  the  '  Apostolicum  ' 
to  such  a  point  that  all  writings  left  by  the  Apostles  should 
really  be  included  in  it  in  their  entirety,  and  all  that  was 
not  Apostolic  should  be  removed,  even  at  the  cost  of  well- 
established  custom.  Henceforward  the  work  advances  con- 
sciously in  both  directions.  Keason  founded  on  principle 
takes  this  important  province  into  its  own  hands  ;  it  sets  in 
order  the  spontaneous  growth  of  former  times  ;  and  it  follows 
that  the  services  it  renders  to  the  Canon  are  scarcely  less 
momentous  than  those  rendered  by  the  labours  of  the  two 
preceding  periods. 


519 


CHAPTER  III 

THE    DEVELOPMENT    OF    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    CANON    DOWN    TO 
THE    TIME    WHEN    IT    TOOK    ITS    PRESENT    SHAPE 

§  39.  The  New  Testament  of  the  Greek  Church  from 
c.  200  to  c.  330 

1,  IT  has  already  been  shown  that  Clement,  the  representative 
of  the  Eastern  Church  of  about  200,  had  less  hesitation  than 
his  Roman  and  African  contemporaries  in  granting  admission 
within  the  limits  of  the  new  Holy  Scriptures :  this  lack  of 
definite  rule  in  the  matter  of  the  Canon  is  typical  of  the  Greek 
Church  down  to  the  time  of  Athanasius.  The  Alogi  of  Asia 
Minor,  with  their  determined  criticism  of  all  the  writings  of 
John,  were  afterwards  naturally  considered  heretics  ;  but  the 
majority  of  contemporary  Christians  did  not  look  upon  them  as 
enemies  of  the  Church  because  of  their  dissent  in  questions  of 
the  Canon.  Indeed,  a  Roman  theologian  of  repute  named  Caius, 
who  wrote  in  Greek  and  flourished  early  in  the  third  century, l 
ventured  on  a  similar  criticism,  in  his  wrath  at  the  Montanists' 
assiduous  preparation  of  '  new  Scriptures,'  by  simply  declaring 
the  favourite  book  of  those  enthusiasts,  the  Apocalypse,  to  be 
an  impudent  forgery  of  the  arch-heretic  Cerinthus.2  The 
name  of  John  indeed  is  not  mentioned  in  the  observations  of 
Caius  which  Eusebius  has  preserved  3 :  he  only  speaks  of  a 
great  Apostle  who  was  falsely  asserted  to  be  the  recipient  of 
this  angelic  revelation,  but  as  the  description  of  the  contents 
corresponds  exactly  with  our  Apocalypse,  and  as  Eusebius,  who 
had  the  context  before  him,  refers  it  to  this,  we  cannot  doubt 
that  it  was  this  which  Caius  attacked  as  a  non-Apostolic  book, 
with  no  claim  to  Divinity,  and  therefore  uncanonical.  This 

1  Euseb.  Hist.  Eccles.  VI.  xx.  3  ;  \oyi(araros  avTjp.  -  See  p.  277. 

3  Hist.  Eccles.  III.  xxviii.  2. 


520     AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  m. 

supposition  is  confirmed  by  the  fragments  of  a  controversial 
writing  of  Hippolytus  against  Caius  (preserved  in  Syriac), 
in  which  the  latter's  objections  to  portions  of  the  Apocalypse, 
such  as  viii.  8,  12,  ix.  15  etc.,  are  brought  forward  and  refuted. 
There  were  thus  some  within  the  Church  who  were  already 
beginning  to  object  to  the  chiliasm  and  the  sensuous  expecta- 
tions of  the  Apocalypse,  and  as  they  considered  their  own  con- 
victions necessarily  identical  with  the  revelation  of  God,  they 
drew  the  conclusion  that  a  work  which  contradicted  these 
convictions  could  only  have  been  surreptitiously  conveyed 
into  a  collection  of  sacred  books. 

Their  protest  is  no  proof  that  a  Canon  containing  the 
Apocalypse  was  not  in  existence  at  that  time,  but  only  that  it 
had  not  been  in  existence  long  enough,  nor  in  a  sufficiently 
settled  form,  to  make  any  correction  of  it  appear  mon- 
strous. The  Canon  was  still  visibly  growing  in  one  direction  : 
then  it  must  also  be  permissible,  on  the  ground  of  better 
information,  to  cut  it  down  in  another.  Books  with 
heterodox  contents  were,  of  course,  excluded  everywhere. 
Thus  about  the  year  200,  Bishop  Serapion  of  Antioch  pro- 
hibited the  use  of  the  Gospel  of  Peter  in  the  community 
of  Khossus,  as  soon  as  he  heard  that  dangerous  doctrines 
were  there  encouraged  by  it.  His  conduct1  in  the  matter 
is  most  characteristic.  On  a  former  visit  of  his  to  Ehossus 
he  had  conferred  the  favour  on  its  church  (which  he  found 
standing  firm  in  the  true  faith)  of  permitting  it  to  read 
the  Gospel  of  Peter,  till  then  unknown  to  him,  in  its 
services  :  whether  as  well  as  the  four  Canonical  Gospels,  or 
instead  of  one  of  them,  he  does  not  say.  Soon  afterwards 
heresy  broke  out  in  Khossus  ;  the  Gospel  of  Peter  was  ap- 
pealed to  on  behalf  of  Docetism ;  Serapion  examined  it, 
found  some  parts  of  it  to  be  false  and  rejected  it  peremp- 
torily as  a  forgery  (-^svBsTTLjpa^ov) — as  though  he  could  have 
thought  it  genuine  before  without  at  once  procuring  so  great 
a  treasure  for  his  own  use  and  introducing  it  to  his  other 
churches  !  But  a  clear  distinction  between  h is torical  judgment 
as  to  the  spuriousness  of  a  book  professing  to  be  Apostolic, 

1  Described  according  to  his  own  account  of  it  in  Euseb.  Hist.  EccL  VI. 
xii.  2-6. 


§39.]     NEW    TESTAMENT   OF   GREEK    CHURCH  C.  200-330      521 

and  dogmatic  judgment  as  to  heretical  elements  in  its  con- 
tents, was  quite  beyond  the  powers  of  the  early  Church.  The 
name  '  Pseudepigraph  '  always  indicates  both — a  rejection  from 
historic  as  well  as  dogmatic  motives.  This  amalgamation  of 
the  two  points  of  view  will  soon  take  place  more  definitely 
and  with  more  serious  consequences.  What  was  accidentally 
set  aside  in  Rhossus  had  probably  been  read  with  reverence 
for  some  time  in  other  communities,  and  naturally  the  Gospel 
of  Peter  had  not  taken  a  lower  place  than  that  of  Matthew  or 
Mark.  But  not  only  the  Gospel  of  Peter  had  enjoyed  such 
distinction.  The  '  Shepherd '  of  Hermas  was  treated  by 
practically  all  the  Greek  theologians  of  the  third  century  who 
had  occasion  to  use  it  as  a  canonical  document.  Methodius  of 
Olympus,1  the  greatest  ecclesiastical  teacher  of  the  opposite 
school  to  Origen,  included  in  his  Canon  the  Apocalypse  of 
Peter,  and  perhaps  also  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas  and  the 
'  Teaching  of  the  Apostles  ' ;  and  we  may  conclude  from  the 
remarkably  keen  interest  shown,  for  instance,  by  Eusebius, 
in  the  definite  exclusion  of  certain  books  from  the  canonical 
sphere,  that  in  his  neighbourhood  the  Church  had  not  yet 
attained  complete  success  in  its  efforts  to  eject  troublesome 
appendages  from  the  Canon. 

•2.  And  yet  the  Greek  Church  possessed,  between  200  and 
330,  a  teacher  /car'  efo^iji/ ;  both  in  quality  and  quantity 
her  greatest  writer  is  Origen  (f  254),  the  head  of  the 
Alexandrian  school.  His  position  with  regard  to  the  new 
Canon  must  be  examined  on  account  of  his  extraordinary 
influence.2  Unfortunately,  an  element  of  difficulty  attends 
such  an  examination,  owing  to  the  fact  that  a  considerable  part 
of  his  work  is  altogether  lost,  and  another  part  is  only  preserved 
in  Latin  translations,  which  cannot  by  any  means  be  called 
literal.  For  this  indefatigable  writer,  who  represented  the 
Eastern  Church  of  about  250,  was  condemned  as  a  heretic  in 
the  sixth  century  by  that  very  Church,  and  it  is  only  in  few  and 
scattered  fragments  that  she  has  preserved  his  works  for 
herself  and  after  times.  Nevertheless,  there  is  no  doubt  as 
to  the  principal  points. 

1  c.  300.  2  Some  material  in  Preuschen  ;  see  above,  p.  459. 

8  Of  Jerome  and  Rufinus. 


522     AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  in. 

(a)  Origen  knows  no  distinction  of  value  within  the  limits  of 
the  Holy  Scriptures  between  the  old  and  the  new  ;  he  com- 
ments on  the  new — on  Matthew,  John  and  Eomans — in  the 
same  manner  as  on  Exodus  and  Leviticus,  with  the  same  pre- 
sumption in  either  case,  that   he  has   before   him   inspired 
books,  full  of  unerring  truth,  and  with   the  same   methods 
of   treatment.     In    argument   he  is  quite  indifferent   as   to 
whether  his  citations  come  from  the  Old  or  the  New  Testa- 
ment.    One  sentence  from  his  Commentary  on  Matt.  xiii.  52  ' 
may  serve   as   a  proof   of   this :  *  We  must   study   the   law 
of  the  Lord  day  and  night,  and  not  only  the  new  decrees  of 
the   Gos2)els,  and  the   Apostles,  and  their   revelation,   but 
also  the  old  decrees  to  be  found  in  the  Law,  which   fore- 
shadowed the  good  things   to  come,   and  the  Prophets  who 
prophesied  of  these  things.'     A  passage  from  his  Commentary 
on  John  (torn,  v.)  received  in  the  '  Philocalia  '  the  apposite 
heading,  *  That  all  inspired  Scripture  forms  a  single  book.' 
Further,  he  finds  support  for  the  unity  of  the  divine  book 
(TO  SVLKOV  TTJS  Betas  plJ3\ov)  in  passages  such  as  Eev.  v.  1  fol. 
and  x.  10  ;  for  him  it  is  from  beginning  to  end  the  Book  of  Life. 
Yet  he  does  not  deny  the  difference  between  Old  and  New  :  he 
admits  that  the  one  offers  shadow  and  prophecy,  the  other 
fulfilment  and  revelation — though  such  a  proposition  agrees 
but   ill   with   his  method   of   interpretation,   which  regards 
everything  in  the  Bible  as  possessing  a  double  meaning,  a 
plain  and  a  secret  text.     But  even  the  name  '  New  Testa- 
ment '  for  the  sum  of  the  new  books  as  opposed  to  the  Old 
(?7  KaiVY)  and  rf  Trakaia  §ia6r)tcri)   is  already  a  familiar  phrase 
with  Origen,  and  in  the  course  of  the  next  century  becomes 
established  in  the  whole  Church,  with  the  name  of  *  Novum 
Testamentum '  in  the  Latin  branch.     In  the  New  Testament, 
again,  he  makes  a  clear  division  between  Gospels  and  Apostolic 
writings,  as  in  the  Old  Testament  between  the  Law  and  the 
Prophets,  for  to  him  '  the  Kevelation  of  the  Apostles  '  is  not 
the  title  of  a  single  book,  but  an  honourable  appellation  for 
everything,  excepting  the  Gospels,  left  by  the  Apostles. 

(b)  But  which  books  did  Origen  include  in  his  New  Testa- 
ment?  The  sacred  number  of  the  Four  Gospels  was  considered 

1  Tom.  x.  15. 


§  39,]     NE\V    TKSTAMENT    OF   GREEK    CHURCH  C.  200-330      523 

much  more  incontestable  by  the  disciple  of  Clement  than  it  had 
once  been  by  the  master  l ;  he  mentions  them  times  without 
number  simply  by  the  names  of  their  authors,  and  we  find 
that  he  made  use  of  Gospel  material  from  other  sources  less 
frequently  than  Clement.  In  the  second  part  of  the  New 
Testament— ' The  Apostles' — he  certainly  includes  the  Acts  as 
well  as  the  Epistles.  There  were  fourteen  Epistles  of  Paul. 
Although  he  had  critical  doubts  with  regard  to  the  Epistle 
to  the  Hebrews,  especially  on  account  of  the  difference  in 
style,  yet  the  ideas  were  those  of  Paul,  and  so  he  quoted  it  con- 
stantly (almost  preferring  it  to  the  rest)  expressly  as  Scripture, 
as  the  word  of  the  Apostle,  or  of  Paul.  In  his  churches 
this  Epistle  must  have  formed  part  of  the  Corpus  Paulinarum. 
But  we  find  him  setting  the  Epistles  of  other  Apostles  on  the 
same  level ;  and  among  these  some  expansion  has  taken 
place ;  2.  and  3.  John,  Jude,  James,  and  2.  Peter  are  used 
beside  1.  Peter  and  1.  John,  and  are  quite  familiar  to  the 
writer,  who  appears  to  presume  a  similar  acquaintance  on 
the  part  of  his  readers.  It  is  true  that  everyone  must  notice 
a  certain  hesitation  when  the  master  makes  use  of  quotations 
from  these  minor  Epistles  :  they  are  not  a  final  tribunal ;  he 
saves  himself  by  such  phrases  as  '  In  case  anyone  should 
appeal  to,'  etc.  The  Epistle  of  Jude  has  the  qualification 
fapofisvr),  by  which  the  responsiblity  for  the  title  is  shifted  on 
to  other  shoulders.  Origen  was  not  accustomed  to  speak  of 
the  first  Epistle  of  John  or  Peter,  as  he  so  often  did  of 
Corinthians  and  Thessalonians.  Evidently  while  1.  Peter  and 
1.  John  were  as  firmly  established  as  the  Pauline  Epistles,  he 
did  not  wish  to  give  a  final  judgment  in  the  case  of  the  five 
minor  Epistles  ;  he  would  not  contest  the  fact  that  they  were 
Apostolic  writings,  and  saw  that  in  this  case  they  belonged  to 
the  New  Testament  (hence  he  could  only  understand  their 
rejection  as  due  to  a  doubt  of  their  genuineness,  whereas 
in  reality  it  was  mostly  due  to  the  Church's  former  ignorance 
of  them) ;  but  he  was  supported  too  little  by  the  custom  of  the 
Church  to  be  able  to  treat  them  simply  as  equal  in  value  with 
those  which  had  long  been  received  into  the  Church.  And  what 
was  there  besides  the  custom  of  the  Church,  the  judgment 

1  rb  a\ir)doos  Sia  recrffdpuv  fv  etrriv  eucryyeAjoj/ :   Comm.  in  Joll.  torn.  v.  3. 


524     AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  in. 

of  the  Fathers  (oi  ap^aloc  avSpss),  that  was  capable  of  deciding 
on  the  genuineness  of  the  Apostolic  title  borne  by  a  given 
document,  provided  indeed  that  it  did  not  betray  itself  as  a 
forgery  by  heretical  contents?  Historical  criticism  surely 
could  not  influence  the  definition  of  the  formative  principles 
of  the  Christian  religion  ! 

With  regard  to  the  Apocalypses,  again,  the  position  of 
Origen  is  no  clearer.  He  often  quotes  that  of  John,  quotes  it, 
moreover,  as  part  of  Holy  Scripture,  e.g.  In  Joh.  torn.  i.  22 : 
EV  rfi  'Icodvvov  aTro/caXvtysi,  \SJSL.  Nor  does  he  doubt  that  it 
was  composed  by  the  Evangelist  and  Beloved  Disciple,  but  he 
is  not  in  sympathy  with  it,  and  betrays  peculiar  animosity  in 
the  sentence  preserved  by  Eusebius,  Hist.  Eccl.  VI.  xxv.  9 : 
'  John  moreover  wrote  the  Apocalypse,  although  [?]  he  had 
received  the  command  to  be  silent  and  not  to  write  the 
utterance  of  the  seven  thunders.' 

The  '  Shepherd  '  of  Hennas  he  quotes  repeatedly  as  an 
authority  to  be  revered  ;  but  as  this  was  neither  a  Gospel  nor 
the  work  of  an  Apostle,  he  cannot  have  included  it  in  his  New 
Testament.  Touching  the  authenticity  of  the  '  Preaching  of 
Pete}',1  he  refuses  to  be  drawn  into  controversy  with  Heracleon 
(see  below,  p.  528).  When  he  discusses  a  saying  of  Jesus  from 
the  Acts  of  Paul  (In.  Joli.  torn.  xx.  12)  this  apocryphal 
book  of  Acts  is  not  thereby  assigned  any  higher  rank  than 
is  the  Gospel  of  the  Hebrews  when  employed  in  the  same 
Commentary  (torn.  ii.  12)  ;  the  reader  is  sufficiently  prepared 
by  expressions  such  as  '  should  one  appeal  to  it,'  '  should  we 
wish  to  accept  a  word  recorded  in  the  Acts  of  Paul  as  having 
been  spoken  by  the  Saviour ' ;  in  this  case  the  question  is 
obviously  not  of  canonicity,  but  of  the  mere  credibility  of  a 
writer.  But  could  a  Non  liquet  be  tolerated  by  the  Church 
in  regard  to  a  portion  of  the  Gospel  or  the  words  of  an 
Apostle  ? 

(c)  Origen  knew  no  way  out  of  these  perplexities.  Even  if 
as  many  as  seven  non-Pauline  Epistles  were  perhaps  being 
read  in  the  Alexandrian  church,  he  was  too  well  informed 
not  to  know  of  the  divergences  in  other  churches,  and  his 
scientific  conscience  did  not  permit  him  to  conceal  the 
state  of  the  case.  The  importance,  too,  of  a  decision  on  this 


§39.]      M:\\     TESTAMENT    OP   GREEK    CHURCH  C.  200-330 

question  was  clear  to  him,  clearer  than  to  most  other  men, 
since  his  immense  literary  knowledge  made  him  aware  how 
much  useless  stuff  was  current  under  the  Apostolic  aegis. 
But,  unfortunately,  he  was  too  modest  to  dictate  the  decision  ; 
in  the  end  he  was  satisfied  with  recording  the  facts  in 
statistical  form.  The  idea  of  making  out  different  classes  of 
'  Evangelico-Apostolic  '  books  originated  with  him,  not  that  he 
wished  to  keep  them  permanently  in  these  classes,  but  only  to 
give  the  results  of  his  researches  into  the  state  of  the  question. 
In  the  case  of  all  writings  which  came  under  his  considera- 
tion, whether  as  to  their  titles  or  their  contents,  the  reader, 
or  the  community,  might  learn  from  him  whether  they 
were  definitely  accepted,  formally  rejected,  or  still  debateable 
—  that  is  to  say,  whether  the  churches  took  up  a  varying 
position  with  regard  to  them.  The  first  class  includes  those 
which  are  universally  recognised  (dvavTippifiTa,6iJLo\oryov/jLEi>a} 
—the  four  Gospels,  the  Acts,  the  Apocalypse  (!),  1.  Peter, 
1.  John,  the  Pauline  Epistles — and  of  these,  by  strict  right, 
only  thirteen.  Origen  knew  that  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  was 
not  universally  recognised  as  Pauline,  or  as  Apostolic,  but  his 
own  inclination  made  him  advocate  the  unreserved  addition  of 
this  Epistle  to  the  others ;  he  never  called  it  expressly  one  of 
the  Homologumena,  but  treated  it  practically  as  such.  (2) 
As  false  tysv&ri)  are  reckoned  the  Gospel  according  to  the 
Egyptians,  that  of  the  Twelve,  above  all  that  Kara  BacrtAe/S?^, 
and  all  that  the  heretics  had  forged  under  the  names  of  Gospels 
or  Apostles.  Between  these  two  stands  Class  3,  the  doubtful 
writings  (d^i^a\\6fjb£va)  :  2.  Peter,  2.  and  3.  John — probably 
also  James  and  Jude  (and  Hernias  ?)  those  whose  genuine- 
ness, whose  Apostolic  authorship,  was  doubtful  (ov  Trdvrss 
(fracrl  yvtffffavi  SLVCLI  Tavras). 

3.  This  classification  met  with  the  entire  approbation  of 
Eusebius,  the  famous  ecclesiastical  historian  and  true  follower 
of  Origen,  who  stood  at  the  turning-point  between  two  epochs, 
and  studied  the  history  of  the  New  Testament  Canon  with 
peculiar  interest,  as  far  as  a  learned  Christian  of  that  time  could 
study  it.  In  §  III.  xxv.  of  his  principal  work  he  summed  up  the 
total  results  of  his  researches — probably  not  without  a  secret 
desire  in  some  degree  to  influence  public  opinion  upon  the 


526      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  in. 

question  of  the  Canon  [Text  in  Preuschen,  see  p.  459]. 
Here  he  aims  at  giving  a  catalogue  of  the  '  Scriptures  of  the 
New  Testament.'  In  the  first  place  there  were  the  four 
Gospels,  then  the  Acts,  the  Pauline  Epistles  (whether  thirteen 
or  fourteen  was  left  doubtful,  as  with  Origen — but  according 
to  III.  iii.  5  Eusebius  thought  fourteen),  lastly  1.  John  and 
1.  Peter,  and  '  if  it  seems  good  '  (st  ys  ^avsirf)  the  Apocalypse 
also.  These  books  are  universally  recognised,  and  recognised 
moreover  as  Divine  Scriptures.1  On  the  other  hand,  the 
Epistles  of  James  and  Jude,  2.  Peter,  and  2.  and  3.  John  are 
disputed  (avri\sy6fjLsvd),  it  being  uncertain  whether  these  last- 
were  written  by  the  Evangelist  or  by  another  John.  Also  to  be 
numbered  among  the  not  genuine  (v60a) 2  are  the  Acts  of  Paul, 
Hermas,  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter,  Barnabas,  the  '  Teaching  of 
the  Apostles ' ;  lastly,  if  desired,  the  Apocalypse  of  John  and 
the  Gospel  according  to  the  Hebrews.  The  extraordinary  fact 
that  Eusebius  could  count  the  same  Apocalypse  among  the 
universally  recognised  and  the  contested  books  is  only  compre- 
hensible when  we  remember  his  dependence  on  Origen,  who 
counted  it  among  the  Homologumena.  But  Eusebius  knew 
that  some  rejected  it,  or  denied  that  it  was  written  by  the 
Apostle,  and  therefore,  for  his  part,  he  felt  obliged  to  count  it 
among  the  Antilegomena,  where  the  Gospel  according  to 
the  Hebrews  might  at  best  find  a  place.  The  New  Testa- 
ment in  the  strictest  sense  was  composed  of  those  Scriptures 
which,  according  to  the  tradition  of  the  Church,  were  true, 
uncorrupted  and  universally  recognised  (twenty-one  docu- 
ments, or  according  to  Origen,  who  included  the  Apocalpyse, 
twenty-two).  The  Antilegomena  no  longer  formed  part  of 
the  New  Testament— that  is  to  say,  of  the  absolutely  certain 
norm  of  Christian  faith  n — but  were,  nevertheless,  well  known  to 
very  many  ecclesiastical  writers,  and  had,  at  any  rate,  nothing 
at  all  in  common  with  the  Gospels  produced  by  heretics,  such 
as  those  of  Peter,  Thomas,  and  Matthias,  or  with  Acts  of 
the  Apostles  such  as  those  of  Andrew,  John,  &c.,  which  had 
never  been  thought  worthy  of  mention  by  one  of  the  authori- 
ties of  the  Church,  and  which  alike  in  style  and  contents 

1  III.  iii.  7.  2  Hence  voOtvttv,  to  set  aside  in  this  category. 


§  39.J     NEW    TESTAMENT    OF    (JRKKK    CHURCH  C.  200-330     527 

were  far  removed  from  the  Apostolic  standard.     They  were 
to  be  avoided  as  *  quite  perverted  and  godless  ' 


As  Eusebius  makes  isolated  remarks  on  this  subject  in 
other  parts  of  his  '  Ecclesiastical  History,'  and  in  doing  so 
changes  his  class-titles,  his  classification  has  given  rise  to 
much  controversy.  But  we  may  regard  it  as  settled  that  after 
careful  proof  he  considered  that  the  collective  body  of  docu- 
ments which  had  any  claim  whatever  to  be  called  sacred  fell 
into  three  classes  :  the  undoubtedly  Apostolic  (21),  the  Anti- 
legomena,  and  the  Anti-Apostolic,  which  in  III.  xxxi.  6  he  calls 
entirely  spurious  (iravTsKws  v60a).  There  was  no  doubt  as 
to  the  books  belonging  to  the  third  class  ;  the  distinction 
between  Classes  I.  and  II.  he  drew,  not  according  to  the 
results  of  historical  criticism,  but  by  counting  the  authorities 
for  or  against.  What  was  unanimously  accepted  by  all  be- 
longed to  the  first  class  ;  what  only  a  part  admitted  belonged 
to  the  second.  The  statistician  is  here  surrounded  by  obscu- 
rity and  confusion.  He  says  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  l 
that  it  was  not  recognised  as  an  Epistle  of  Paul  by  the 
Roman  churches,  but  yet  it  does  not  occur  to  him  to  include 
it  among  the  Antilegomena.  Again,  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter 
stands  in  one  place2  among  the  Antilegomena  (that  is, 
among  the  much  used  and  quoted  writings),  even  before  the 
Apocalypse  of  John  ;  in  another  3  it  is  said  to  be  unknown  in 
Catholic  communities  and  not  quoted  by  any  ecclesiastical 
writer.  Further,  the  authorities  of  Eusebius  were  sometimes 
the  churches,4  sometimes  the  ecclesiastical  writers  (especially 
those  of  old  time),  and  once  he  expressly  assures  us5  that  he 
intends  to  state  in  a  later  page  which  of  the  ecclesiastical 
writers  of  different  times  made  use  of  Antilegomena,  and 
of  how  many  of  these,  as  well  as  what  they  said  about  the 
universally  recognised  Scriptures  and  about  those  which  were 
not  so  recognised.  The  opinions  of  churches  he  knew  only 
from  his  own  experience  ;  those  of  individual  writers  he 
gathered  from  widely  differing  periods,  and  a  combination  of 

1  III.  iii.  5.  2  III.  xxv.  4  (cf.  VI.  xiv.  1). 

a  III.  iii.  2.  «  II.  xxiii.  25  ;  III.  iii.  6  ;  XVI.  xxxi.  6. 

5  III.  iii.  3. 


528     AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  m. 

the  two  was  bound  to  give  a  perverted  image.  If  the 
churches  of  his  day  were  unanimous  in  accepting  what 
certain  writers  150  years  before  had  contested,  must  the 
book  in  question  nevertheless  be  counted  among  the  Anti- 
legomena  to  all  eternity  ?  Was  it  possible,  on  the  other  hand, 
to  maintain  a  class  of  books  which  by  some  authorities 
were  counted  among  the  Divine,  but  not  by  others  ?  For  the 
one  party  did  not  merely  reckon  as  '  useful '  what  the  other 
ignored,  but  treated  it  exactly  as  they  did  the  other 
Scriptures  (pera  TCOV  a\\<ov  sa-TrovSdo-dr)  ypacfjcov)  ;  for  in- 
stance, they  '  published '  the  Epistles  of  James  and  Jude  to- 
gether with  the  other  Epistles  (ical  ravras  /JLSTO,  rwv  \ot,rrrwv 
sv  7T\sio-raL9  ^s^fjiocrLEv^svas  siacK^o-iais)  ;  and  was  the  fact  of 
not  being  mentioned  to  be  taken  as  a  denial  of  the  book  ? 
Must  a  thing  be  known  everywhere  and  always  if  it  was  to  be 
considered  trustworthy  ? 

But  Eusebius  is  most  unfortunate  of  all  in  his  terminology. 
He  asserts  T  that  of  all  the  writings  bearing  the  name  of 
Peter,  he  knows  but  one  single  Epistle  which  is  genuine  and 
recognised  by  the  Fathers  ;  thus  Class  I.  actually  receives  the 
title  of  '  genuine  ' ;  but  if  Class  III.  bears  the  designation 
'  absolutely  spurious,'  Class  II.  must  lie  between  the  perfectly 
genuine  and  the  absolutely  spurious  ;  and  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
Eusebius  uses  for  it  the  term  '  spurious '  (v66a).  For  the 
context  of  the  principal  passage,  III.  xxv.  3-6,  forbids  us  to 
accept  a  division  of  the  second  class  into  two  sections— one 
containing  such  books  as  merely  took  the  title  of  the  whole 
class  (Antilegomena),  and  the  other  those  which  might  also 
be  called  '  spurious  ' ;  and  if  Peter  left  only  one  genuine  docu- 
ment behind  him,  what  could  the  other  writings  of  Peter  be 
but  spurious  ?  And  is  it  of  '  spurious  writings  '  that  we  are 
again  and  again  assured  that  they  belonged  to  the  public 
possession  of  most  of  the  communities  ?  Here  again  Eusebius 
can  only  be  understood  through  Origen,  who,  in  making 
an  incidental  use  of  the  '  Kerygma  Petri,'  says  that  he  would 
not  at  the  moment  argue  whether  the  book  were  genuine, 
spurious  or  mixed  (yvrjaiov  77  voOov  r)  /JLIKTOV)  .  In  my  opinion, 
we  have  no  right  to  identify  these  three  words  unreservedly 

1  III.  iii.  4. 


§39.]      NEW    TI-STAMKNT  Ol-MJllFJ'lK    CHURCH    C.  300-330      ~)'JO 

with  the  headings  used  in  Origen's  classification;  it  by  no 
means  follows  from  this  that  Origen  had  drawn  up  a  class  of 
*  mixed'  writings  identical  with  his  Amphiballomena,  while 
Eusebius,  by  an  oversight,  included  f  spurious  '  with  'mixed.' 
Origen  is  there  considering — very  reasonably  too,  and  only 
in  the  case  of  the  '  Preaching  of  Peter ' — that  there  exist  three 
possibilities  :  (1)  that  the  document  was  really  derived  wholly 
and  entirely  from  the  Apostle  Peter,  in  which  case  it  would 
be  '  genuine  ' ;  (2)  that  it  had  only  been  falsely  attributed 
to  him,  in  which  case  it  would  be  '  spurious ' ;  and  (3)  that 
it  contained  much  that  was  really  Peter's,  but  interspersed 
with  the  thoughts  of  a  later  writer,  in  which  case  it  must  be 
called  '  mixed.'  Origen  knew  perfectly  well  that  it  did  not 
belong  to  the  Hoinologumena :  if,  nevertheless,  he  leaves 
open  the  possibility  of  its  genuineness,  this  shows  that  he 
does  not  consider  I '  genuine  '  and  '  universally  recognised  '  to 
be  identical  ideas.  It  was  a  serious  mistake  on  the  part  of 
Eusebius  if  he  identified  *  genuine  '  with  '  recognised  '  through 
an  imperfect  remembrance  of  Origen  ;  for  the  former  involves 
a  personal  judgment :  the  latter  is  the  result  of  a  statistical 
inquiry.  When  (in  this  case  logically)  he  describes  the  writings 
of  his  second  class— no  longer  genuine,  though  much  esteemed 
as  reading-books  for  the  churches — as  spurious,  he  weakens  the 
sense  of  the  word  in  his  own  mind  to  mean  not  undisputedly 
genuine  (v6Qa  =  books  of  an  dvTL\syofjLsvr)  yvrj-Ttor^s}. 

The  fact  is  that  in  the  case  of  many  of  these  books  it  was 
not  their  genuineness  in  a  literary  and  historical  sense  which 
was  called  in  question  (e.g.  in  the  case  of  1.  Clement,1  Hermas 
and  Barnabas) ;  still  less  was  it  their  genuineness  in  a  dog- 
matic sense,  for  those  writings  which  were  false  and  deceitful 
in  that  sense  of  course  composed  the  third  class.  It  was 
only  their  right  of  belonging  to  the  Canon  that  was  objected 
to,  and  chiefly  on  the  ground  of  established  custom.  Certainly 
as  regards  writings  with  an  Apostolic  title,  it  was  only 
possible  to  contest  them — when  once  the  whole  Church 
had  become  thoroughly  imbued  with  the  idea  that  the  only 
condition  of  Canonicity  was  that  of  Apostolic  origin — by 
demonstrating  their  spuriousness  in  a  literary  sense.  On 

1  VI.  xiii.  6. 

M  M 


530     AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP,  in. 

this  point  the  Church  must  be  clear  ;  the  question  could  not 
remain  undecided  as  to  whether  a  certain  work  were  of 
Apostolic  origin  or  only  falsely  attributed  to  an  Apostle,  and 
thus  the  Apostolic  writings  termed  '  spurious  '  by  Eusebius 
—perhaps  this  unendurable  epithet  helped  to  hasten  the 
decision — were  obliged  to  range  themselves  either  with  the 
first  or  the  third  class.  Either  it  was  found  possible  to  believe 
in  their  Apostolic  origin,  in  which  case  every  protest  must 
cease,  and  the  documents  be  received  into  the  Canon  of  the 
*  most  genuine  '  (this  is  the  result  in  the  case  of  the  five  later 
Catholic  Epistles  and  the  Apocalypse)  ;  or  the  decision  was 
given  against  them,  and  then  the  partial  esteem  which  they 
had  formerly  enjoyed  tended  precisely  to  destroy  their  reputa- 
tion, and  they  were  called  godless  and  lying  :  this  was  the  fate 
of  the  Gospels  of  the  Hebrews  and  of  Peter,  the  Acts  of  Paul, 
the  Apocalypse  of  Peter,  and  so  on.  That  this  process  had 
already  begun  in  the  time  of  Eusebius  is  shown  by  the  fact 
that  he  never  expressly  uses  the  term  '  spurious  '  for  the  five 
Catholic  Epistles  ;  they  stand  high  up  in  the  second  class, 
and  he  takes  a  breath,  as  it  were,  before  going  on  to  the 
other  books  of  the  same  class  ;  it  is  not  without  intention, 
moreover,  that  he  places  the  Apocalypse  of  John  rather  low 
down  in  the  second  list. 

4.  If  Eusebius  had  not  yielded  very  decidedly  to  his  own 
learned  proclivities  in  his  labours  and  writings  upon  the 
history  of  the  Canon,  a  very  different  picture  of  the  position 
of  the  New  Testament  in  the  Greek  Church  of  his  time  would 
probably  have  resulted.  He  himself  scarcely  knew  several  of 
the  Antilegomena  about  which  he  discourses  so  eagerly.  The 
Greek  Church  of  his  time  acknowledged  (besides  the  four 
Gospels)  the  Acts,  fourteen  Pauline  Epistles  —  the  number 
fourteen  was  only  contested  among  the  Latins — and  seven 
Catholic  Epistles.  Theologians  were  still  aware  that  the 
majority  of  these  seven  Epistles  had  only  recently  won  their 
\v«iy  to  general  esteem  ;  but  as  far  as  the  Church  was  concerned, 
the  distinction  between  them  was  already  smoothed  away ;  she 
possessed  a  collection  of  seven  Epistles  for  which  she  had  even 
invented  a  special  name,  that  of  the  Catholic  Epistles.1  Eusebius 
bears  witness  to  this  (in  II.  xxiii.  25  * ),  and  as  he  had  shortly 

1  Seep.  2  )l  *  Cf.  VI.  adv.  1. 


§39.]      NEW   TESTAMENT  OF  GK KKK    CHURCH    C.  800-330      531 

before  mentioned  the  Epistle  of  Jarnes  as  the  first  of  the  so- 
called  Catholic  Epistles,  there  appears  already  to  exist  a  settled 
order  of  precedence  within  this  second  Canon  of  Epistles.  But 
when  once  James  stands  before  1.  Peter  in  the  manuscripts, 
it  is  at  most  a  learned  archaism  to  designate  James  as  OVK 
ev&id07)/co$,  while  1.  Peter  is  included  in  the  New  Testament. 

Thus  the  second  part  of  the  New  Testament,  which  Origen 
called  '  The  Apostle,'  is  now  for  the  Greek  Christians  just  as 
complete  as  was  the  first  part,  *  The  Gospels,'  in  the  time  of 
Irenaeus.  It  is  known  which  Epistles  are  to  be  honoured  as 
Apostolic.  Edifying  Epistles  of  other  authors,  such  as  the 
Epistle  of  Barnabas  and  the  Epistles  of  Clement,  were  certainly 
still  read  aloud  in  public  worship  in  many  places,  but  as 
their  authors  did  not  speak  as  Apostles,  and  only  the  word  of 
the  Apostles  was  admitted  into  the  Canon,  there  was  no  danger 
of  their  entering  the  New  Testament ;  they  had  never  stood 
among  the  newly  arranged  '  Catholic '  Epistles,  nor  even 
beside  the  Pauline  and  the  Catholic  Epistles  as  a  third 
division  ;  they  were  treasured,  but  were  not  considered  as  a 
standard  authority — not  as  '  The  Lord.' 

On  the  other  hand,  the  situation  is  proportionately  worse 
in  the  apocalyptic  division  of  the  *  Apostolicon.'  Instead  of 
the  one  Apocalypse  of  John  which  Origen  accepted  as  a 
matter  of  course,  some  used  several,  and  others  would  not 
tolerate  any  at  all  within  the  limits  of  the  New  Testament. 
Even  if  we  had  not  the  testimony  of  Methodius  in  favour  of 
the  Apocalypse  of  Peter,  we  might  conclude  from  Eusebius 
that  this  book  had  enthusiastic  partisans  ;  even  the  non- 
Apostolic  Apocalypse  of  Hermas  was  not  yet  rejected  from  the 
list  of  church  books  ;  and  there  is  no  doubt  that  where  an 
afiection  existed  for  these  two  books,  the  Apocalypse  of  John 
must  have  been  held  in  still  higher  esteem.  But  the  anti- 
Apocalyptic  movement,  which  first  met  us  with  the  Alogi 
and  Caius  about  the  year  200,  had  meanwhile  greatly 
increased.  Origen  was  not  aware  that  the  Apocalypse  of 
John  had  ever  been  contested  :  he  appears  to  have  read  none 
of  the  attacks  of  Caius  ;  but,  considering  the  nature  of  his 
speculations,  it  is  no  matter  for  surprise  that  we  soon  find 
his  school  leading  the  opposition  against  this  Apocalypse. 

M    M    2 


532      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  in. 

Bishop  Dionysius  of  Alexandria  (a  follower  of  Origen),  who 
died  about  the  year  265,  expressed  himself,  according  to  the 
Ecclesiastica  Historia  of  Eusebius,1  in  the  following  terms 
on  the  Apocalypse : — Some  of  the  early  Christians  utterly 
repudiated  the  book,  and  declared  its  title  to  be  false  [he  can 
only  have  been  thinking  of  learned  criticism  such  as  that  of 
Caius],  and  its  real  author  to  be  the  heretic  Cerinthus.  He 
personally  would  not  venture  to  repudiate  a  book  so  dear  to 
many  of  the  brethren,  but  he  did  not  understand  it.  He  did 
not  measure  it  by  his  understanding,  but  accepted  the  fact 
that  its  contents  were  above  his  comprehension  as  a  matter 
of  faith. 

However,  his  critical  doubts  led  him  still  further.  He 
made  a  very  thorough  comparison  between  the  ideas,  literary 
style  and  language  of  the  Apocalypse  and  those  of  fche  Gospel 
and  First  Epistle  of  John  (the  Second  and  Third  Epistles 
are  once  introduced  too  as  letters  of  the  Apostle,  although 
separated  noticeably  from  the  two  principal  writings),  and 
found  it  impossible  to  believe  that  one  man  was  the  author 
of  them  all.  But,  he  continues,  we  need  not  believe  that 
the  author  spoke  falsely  when  he  called  himself  John  ;  there 
were  many  who  bore  the  name  of  John — in  Ephesus  alone  the 
monuments  of  two  were  shown — and  so  perhaps  the  Apo- 
calypse might  have  been  written,  not  by  a  heretic  under  a 
false  name,  but  by  some  real  John,  some  holy  and  inspired 
man.  This  compromise  between  critical  suspicion  and  con- 
sideration for  those  who  reverenced  the  book  might  satisfy 
Dionysius,  but  the  Church  could  not  be  content  with  it.  If 
the  writer  of  the  Apocalypse  was  no  Apostle — and  among  the 
Apostles  there  was  but  one  John — if  it  was  impossible  to 
prove  at  least  a  connection  between  him  and  the  Apostles,  as  in 
the  case  of  Mark  and  Luke,  his  work  could  not  remain  within 
the  Canon.  The  motive  power  in  the  history  of  the  Canon 
here  comes  out  very  clearly.  The  Apocalypse  had  a  brilliant 
record  as  Holy  Scripture  on  its  side ;  even  if  its  non-Apostolic 
authorship  had  been  proved — which  was  not  the  case — a  way 
would  still  have  been  discovered  to  retain  it  within  the  New 
Testament  if  only  the  right  interest  had  been  felt  for  it.  But 

•  VII.  xxv. 


§  39.]     NEW   TESTAMENT  OF  GREEK   CHURCH    C.  200-330      533 

this  was  precisely  lacking  in  many  leaders  of  the  Greek  Church ; 
because  the  contents  of  the  book  were  extremely  inconvenient 
to  them,  their  eyes  were  opened  to  the  discrepancies  of  form 
between  it  and  the  Gospel  and  Epistle.  They  did  not  wish 
to  maintain  its  Apostolic  origin,  and  therefore  thought  they 
were  unable  to  do  so,  or  rather  found  out  that  the  thing 
was  impossible.  Thus  the  denial  of  the  fact  that  it  was 
Apostolic  was  the  first  step  towards  its  exclusion  from  the 
New  Testament.  Eusebius  himself  belonged  to  those  who 
did  not  consider  the  Apocalypse  as  sv^LaO^icos ;  at  first  it 
was  not  read  in  public  worship  only  because  it  was  too 
difficult  of  comprehension,  but  it  was  kept  among  the  collec- 
tions of  church  books.  Once  the  congregations  had  grown 
unaccustomed  to  it,  its  critics  applied  more  drastic  measures, 
and  either  made  a  logical  attack  on  its  right  to  belong 
to  the  Canon  or  else  ignored  it  altogether.  About  the 
year  325  there  were  certainly  many  Greek  churches  which 
believed  themselves  to  possess  complete  New  Testaments  with 
only  twenty-six  Books — the  same  as  those  we  recognise  to-day, 
with  the  exception  of  the  Apocalypse.  Here  and  there  it  was 
probably  quite  unknown,  although  all  kinds  of  appendages 
to  the  New  Testament  were  affectionately  cherished. 

Thus  in  the  Greek  world,  the  advance  to  be  noted  in  the 
history  of  the  Canon  between  the  period  of  Origen  and  that  of 
Athanasius  is,  on  the  one  hand,  a  securer  welding  together  of 
the  seven  Catholic  Epistles,  and  their  attachment  through 
tradition  to  the  Pauline ;  on  the  other,  an  almost  complete 
abandonment  of  the  Apocalyptic  literature  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment. 

§  40.    The  New  Testament  in  the  Latin  Church  from 
c.  200  to  c.  375 

1.  In  this  section  our  limits  may  be  extended  a  little 
farther,  because  the  Latin  Church  did  not  reach  a  turning- 
point  about  the  year  330,  as  did  the  Greek.  The  elevation  of 
Christianity  by  Constantine  to  the  position  of  a  State-religion 
was  not  felt  so  much  as  in  the  East ;  the  Church  had  at  this 


534     AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  in. 

time  no  scholar  like  Eusebius,  with  his  interest  in  the  history 
of  the  Canon  ;  nor  did  any  remarkable  general  development 
take  place  before  the  last  quarter  of  the  fourth  century  ; 
Jerome  and  Augustine,  who  died  in  420  and  430  respectively, 
are,  in  the  West,  the  first  to  indicate  the  beginning  of  the  last 
epoch  of  our  history. 

2.  The    indefatigable   Hippolytus,    Bishop    of    a    schis- 
matical  community   in   Eome    (died  about   220),  represents 
scarcely  any  advance  upon  his  teacher,  Irenaeus,  in  his  view 
of  the  question  of  the  Canon.     The  four  Gospels,  the  Acts, 
and  thirteen  Epistles  of  Paul  are  included  in  his  New  Testa- 
ment ;  and  he  wrote  an  impassioned  defence  of  the  Apocalypse 
against  Caius.    He  was  acquainted,  moreover,  with  1.  Peter  and 

1.  and  2.  John,  and  also  with  Hebrews,  while,  since  the  discovery 
of  his  Commentary  on  Daniel,1  2.  Peter  is  likewise  placed  be- 
yond question  ;  his  acquaintance  with  James  remains  uncertain. 
But   he  never   quotes  Hebrews  as  an  Epistle  of  Paul,  nor 

2.  Peter  as  *  Scripture  '  ;  he  alludes  to  them  in  the  same  way  as 
to  Hermas,  the  Acts  and  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter  and  the  Acts 
of  Paul.     The  fragments  of  his  writings  which  have  come  down 
to   us   do   not,   in   fact,  leave  the  impression   that   all   this 
literature   from   which    he    occasionally   borrows,   possessed 
in  his  eyes  the  same  authority  as  the  Gospels  or  Revelation. 

All  else  that  has  come  down  to  us  from  Roman  Christians 
of  the  third  century  gives  the  same  result :  the  Gospels,  Paul 
with  thirteen  Epistles,  Revelation  in  very  high  esteem,  Acts, 
1.  John,  and  1.  Peter  enjoying  equal  consideration,  but  less 
often  quoted  ;  the  rest  felt  only  below  the  surface.  The  fact, 
however,  deserves  emphasising,  that  about  255  the  Roman 
schismatic  Novatian,2  after  quoting  Rom.  xii.  with  the  words 
beatus  apostolus  Paulus,  introduces  Heb.  xiii.  15  as  follows  : 
sed  et  sanctissimus  Barnabas  .  .  .  inquit.  Hence  Hebrews 
is  included  in  Holy  Scripture,  but  under  the  name  of  Barnabas, 
not  of  Paul. 

3.  The  African  Church  maintained  the  same  conservative 
attitude.     Cyprian,  Bishop  of  Carthage,  who  died  in  285,  was 

1  See  especially  III.  xxii.  4,  IV.  xxvi.  7. 

2  See  p.  108  of  Batiffol's  editio  princeps  of  the  Tractatus  Origenis  (1900), 
which  in  reality  contains  material  peculiar  to  Novatian. 


§40.]     NEW    TESTAMENT    IN    LATIN    CIH'KCll    C.    200-375       535 

exceedingly  fond  of  quoting  the  Bible  in  his  writings,  and  his 
collection  of  '  Maxims ' l  supplies  very  full  information  as  to 
the  compass  of  his  New  Testament.  The  earlier  appendages 
to  the  New  Testament  existed  no  longer ;  he  held  the 
Apocalypse  in  honour,  but  did  not  know  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews,  and  of  the  Catholic  Epistles  quoted  only  1.  Peter 
and  1.  John.  It  is  true  that  another  African  bishop  intro- 
duced 2.  John  as  a  sacred  authority  at  the  Synod  of  the  year 
256,  and  his  introductory  formula,  '  The  Apostle  John  in  his 
Epistle,'  shows  that  we  may  not  conclude  that  when  Cyprian 
makes  a  similar  use  of  the  singular  in  reference  to  1.  John  and 
1.  Peter,  he  knew  only  of  one  Epistle  by  each  of  these  Apostles. 
But  Cyprian  cannot  have  included  the  Second  Epistle  of  John, 
nor,  consequently,  the  Third,  in  his  New  Testament,  otherwise 
he  would  not  have  let  the  best  reference  (2.  Johnx.  11)  in  sup- 
port of  the  precept  that '  men  should  not  converse  with  heretics ' 
escape  him.2 :  the  argumentume  silentio  may  be  considered  in- 
contestable in  such  a  case.  The  numerous  pseudo-Cyprianic 
writings,  which  almost  all  belong  to  the  third  century,  at  first 
sight  display  a  considerable  family  likeness  ;  but  in  reality  the 
sermon  '  Adversus  Aleatores '  shows  marked  divergencies. 
Side  by  side  with  words  of  Paul  it  has  recourse  to  Hermas 
and  the  '  Teaching  of  the  Apostles  ' ;  while  a  number  of  other 
citations  it  makes  from  Christian  authorities  are  even 
yet  unidentified.  This  tract,  which  appears  to  make  use  of 
Cyprian's  *  Testimonia '  (as  did  Lactantius  and  Firmicus 
Maternus  in  later  times)  probably  proceeded  from  the  Bishop 
of  an  African  trading  city,  and  shows  that  in  the  West,  about 
the  year  260,  it  was  agreed  that  the  Four  Gospels,  the  Pauline 
Epistles,  the  Apocalypse,  some  of  the  Catholic  Epistles  r>  and 
the  Acts  were  Canonical,  but  that  the  circumscription  of  the  new 
Canon  against  further  edifying  literature  was  far  from  being 
complete  in  all  churches  alike.  If  this  is  once  granted,  and 
since  the  affection  of  the  Spaniard  Priscillian  (executed  at  Treves- 
about  385)  for  all  kinds  of  Apocryphal  writings  must  surely 
have  sprung  from  an  acquaintance  with  them  obtained  through 

1  Testimonia,  lib.  iii. :  De  Exhortatione  Martyrii. 

2  Testim.  iii.  78  ;  cf.  De  Unitate,  17,  Epist.  lix.  20. 

3  1.  John  iii.  8  is  quoted. 


536     AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP,  in- 

the  Church,  we  may  unhesitatingly  consider  the  interesting 
stichometrical  *  Catalogus  Claromontanus  '  *  to  be  a  witness 
belonging  to  the  Latin  Church.  Here  are  named  among  the 
'  Scripturae,'  and  after  the  Four  Gospels,  first  the  Pauline 
Epistles  (those  to  Philemon  and  the  Thessalonians  are  omitted 
by  an  oversight)  with  the  numbers  of  their  verses,  then  1.  and 
2.  Peter,  James,  1.  2.  and  3.  John,  Jude,  Barnabas,  the  Apo- 
calypse, the  Acts,  the '  Shepherd  '  (Hennas),  the  Acts  of  Paul, 
and  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter.  According  to  its  position  in  the 
list,  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas  appears  to  mean  the  Epistle  to 
the  Hebrews,  a  name  which  has  been  met  with  before  only 
among  the  Latins  ;  Hernias  was  equally  dear  both  to  Eastern 
and  Western  communities.  The  Muratorianum  considered  the 
Apocalypse  of  Peter  as  Canonical.  There  remain  the  Acts  of 
Paul ;  but  even  these  were  occasionally  retained  in  the  Bibles 
of  the  Latin  churches  of  the  fourth  and  fifth  centuries.2 
Thus  any  of  the  Latins  might  well  have  drawn  up  such  a  list 
about  the  year  330 :  it  would,  for  instance,  have  suited  the 
taste  of  a  Priscillian  excellently. 

We  cannot  here  examine  all  the  Fathers  of  the  Latin 
Church  in  turn  as  to  the  limits  of  their  New  Testament ;  in 
many  cases,  too,  the  answers  would  prove  altogether  too  un- 
certain. Briefly,  the  following  statement  may  be  made  as  to 
its  development  between  the  years  200  and  375. 

(a)  There  is  no  attempt  to  shake  the  Four  Gospels,  the 
Acts,  the  thirteen  Pauline  Epistles  and  the  Apocalypse.  The 
hyper-orthodox  Lucifer  of  Cagliari 3  is  the  only  man  who 
omits  the  Apocalypse  (and  this  scarcely  by  accident)  : 
banished  to  the  East  for  many  years,  he  learnt  to  reject  the 
book  from  orthodox  brethren  there.  But  even  Hilary  of 
Poitiers,4  who  was  very  much  under  Greek  influence,  used  the 
Apocalypse  without  hesitation  :  it  was  indeed  obvious  by  about 
the  year  375  that  the  Westerns  would  never  give  up  this 
document,  in  spite  of  the  opposition  of  most  of  the  Eastern 
churches,  (b)  The  number  of  the  Epistles  in  the  second 
class  has  very  slowly  increased ;  the  minor  Epistles  offered  to 

1  On  a  few  blank  pages  in  Codex  D  of  the  Pauline  Epistles.     See  §  52,  2. 

2  Lee  Harnack,  Texte  u.  Unters.,  Neue  Folge,  iv.  3b,  esp.  pp.  20,  33  fol. 
1  t871.  4  tc.  366. 


§40.]     NEW    TESTAMENT   IN    LATIN    CHUlIfll    C.    '200-376      537 

the  Latins  by  their  Eastern  neighbours  were  not  directly 
refused,  since  their  contents  were  orthodox  and  they  bore  the 
names  of  Apostles,  but  it  was  only  in  exceptional  cases  that 
they  were  really  welcomed  ;  1.  Peter  and  1.  John  are  quoted 
far  more  frequently  than  the  other  five  put  together  ;  only 
the  rarest  traces  of  2.  Peter  are  to  be  found  before  the  fourth 
century,  (c)  One  section  of  the  Western  Church  was  al- 
together unacquainted  with  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  to 
which  the  Alexandrian  school  had  given  so  secure  a  position 
within  the  body  of  Pauline  writings  that  it  was  even  treated  by 
some  as  one  of  the  Homologumena.  Others,  like  Commodianus 
— as  to  whose  date,  unfortunately,  we  know  nothing  for 
certain  (perhaps  about  300  ?) — knew  it  and  made  use  of  it ;  they 
had  probably  read  it  in  a  Latin  translation,  but  they  left  the 
question  of  authorship  undecided,  or  named  Barnabas  as  the 
author.  Even  about  the  year  370,  when  the  unknown  Eoman 
whom  we  are  accustomed  to  call '  Ambrosiaster,'  or  the  Briton 
Pelagius,  soon  after  400,  wrote  commentaries  in  Kome  on  the 
Pauline  Epistles,  they  never  thought  of  commenting  on  more 
than  thirteen ;  once  only  Ambrosiaster  quotes,  evidently  from 
memory,  a  passage  from  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews, '  Similarly 
it  is  written  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews ' ;  and  in  the  extensive 
compilation,  also  of  Roman  origin,  published  under  the  name 
of  Augustine — the '  Quaestiones  Veteris  et  Novi  Testamenti  '- 
but  a  single  sentence  from  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  is 
quoted,  though  this  time  it  is  introduced — in  our  texts — by  the 
words  *  The  Apostle  says  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.' 
In  isolated  instances  indeed,  as  with  Hilary,  Lucifer,  and, 
in  Spain,  Priscillian,  mention  is  made  of  the  Epistle  of  Paul 
to  the  Hebrews ;  but  here  the  connection  with  Greek  theology 
is  notorious. 

(d)  On  the  whole,  the  West  showed  a  much  stronger  im- 
pulse than  the  East  towards  the  better  circumscription  of  the 
Canon  against  other  kindred  literature.  In  the  search  for 
the  highest  authority  it  showed  a  far  more  lively  feeling  for 
an  uncompromising  Yea  or  Nay  :  a  classification  such  as  that 
of  Origen,  or  still  more  that  of  Eusebius,  was  here  quite  un- 
heard of.  Philastrius  of  Brescia  (chap.  Ixxxviii.,  see  also  Ix.) 
stands  almost  alone  in  his  opinion,  that  Apocrypha  like  the 


538     AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP  in. 

Acts  of  Andrew,  John,  Peter  or  Paul  should  not  indeed  be 
read  in  the  communities — though  only  because  the  heretics 
had  deformed  them — but  might  well  be  accepted  by  the 
'perfect,'  morum  causa.  A  more  typical  representative  of 
the  spirit  of  his  church  is  Hilary,  with  his  characteristic 
remark,  'What  is  not  contained  in  the  Book  of  the  Law 
must  not  even  be  noticed '  ;  and  Priscillian's  preference 
for  Apocrypha  cost  him  his  head.  But  a  uniform  practice 
among  all  the  Latins  was  so  far  from  being  established  that  it 
was  possible  to  compile  lists  with  thirty-one '  Holy  Scriptures  ' 
of  the  New  Testament,  and  to  preserve  them  down  to  the 
present  time.  Those  books  which,  about  the  year  360,  were 
recognised  in  general  throughout  the  Western  Church  as 
belonging  to  the  New  Testament,  were  probably  the  group  of 
twenty-six  given  by  the  '  Canon  Mommsenianus ' 1  in  its 
'  Indiculum  Novi  Testamenti,'  viz.  the  four  Gospels,  thirteen 
Pauline  Epistles,  the  Acts,  the  Apocalypse,  1.  2.  and  3.  John, 
James,  1.  and  2.  Peter  and  Jude.  (For  surely  we  ought  in  all 
probability  to  supply  the  words  '  James  '  and  '  Jude '  after  the 
'  una  sola '  of  the  last  line  but  two  and  the  last  line  ;  James 
and  Jude  could  not  be  wanting  in  a  New  Testament  which 
already  possessed  2.  Peter.  Otherwise  the  only  explanation 
would  be  that  the  writer  used  the  words  una  sola  as  a  protest 
against  the  three  Epistles  of  John  and  the  two  of  Peter,  and 
therefore  proposed  to  recognise  only  two  of  the  Catholic 
Epistles.  But  then  he  can  no  longer  be  used  as  a  witness 
for  the  fourth  century.)  The  seven  non-Pauline  Epistles, 
however,  do  not  yet  bear  one  common  name  as  they  do  with 
the  Greeks. 

§  41.  The  New  Testament  of  the  Syrian  Church 
down  to  c.  350 

Christians  of  Syrian  speech  have  existed  as  long  as  the 
Church  itself:  but  they  usually  understood  one  of  the  two 
dominant  languages,  and  they  accepted  the  Greek  preaching 
without  difficulty.  But  beyond  the  Euphrates,  in  Mesopotamia 
and  Persia,  this  was  not  to  be  expected.  For  such  Christian 

1  First  published  in  1886  by  Th.  Mommsen,  from  a  MS.  of  the  tenth 
century  ;  also  in  Preuschen  :  see  above  p.  459. 


§  41.]     NEW    TESTAMENT   OP   SYRIAN    CHURCH   TO    C.    3/30     539 

churches  as  were  established  there  in  the  second  century, 
Syriac  was  the  language  of  the  churches,  and  the  language 
in  which  they  must  needs  possess  the  Holy  Scriptures.  Edessa, 
the  reigning  house  of  which  adopted  the  new  religion  soon 
after  200,  was  not  long  in  becoming  the  centre  of  the  young 
national  church ;  and  Bardesanes  of  Edessa,  a  man,  it  must 
be  confessed,  of  Gnostic  tendencies,  created  for  it  a  literature 
of  its  own.  He  composed  psalms  and  wrote  dissertations  in 
Syriac  no  less  learned  than  edifying.  For  a  century,  it  seems, 
he  had  no  successors  of  note ;  their  efforts  did  not  go  beyond 
translations -from  the  Greek.  It  is  not  until  we  come  to  the 
East-Syrian  Aphraates  (about  340)  and  Ephraim  of  Edessa 
(t  373)  that  Syrian  literature  takes  a  new  impulse,  and  the 
writings  of  these  two  men  afford  almost  the  only  information 
we  possess  as  to  the  compass  of  the  oldest  Syriac  Canon.  To 
the  same  period  belongs  the  last  redaction  of  the  '  Doctrina 
Addaei,'  which  expressly  enumerates  the  sacred  books  of  the 
Christians.  From  this  last  it  can  be  definitely  shown  that  the 

*  Diatessaron '  of  Tatian  was  for  centuries  the  Gospel  of  the 
Syrians.     Probably  the  separate  Gospels  were  also  translated 
fairly  early  into  the  vernacular  tongue.     Theologians  were  at 
any  rate  acquainted  with  them,  and  the  text  of  the  separate 
Gospels  intrudes  in  innumerable  instances  into  that  of  the 

*  Diatessaron.'     Nevertheless  the  '  Diatessaron  '  undoubtedly 
occupies   the   first   rank   until  350,    and    in   the   face   of    a 
custom  so  old  and  so  deeply  rooted,  it  may  well  be  imagined 
that  the  Catholic  demand  that  the  four  separate  Gospels  should 
be  used  as  the  Gospel  of  the  whole  Church  was  carried  out 
with  enormous  difficulty.1     The  Pauline  Epistles  and  the  Acts 
('  the  Acts  of  the  Twelve,'   or  even  of   '  all  '  the   Apostles) 
were  placed  beside  the  '  Evangelium  Christi '  in  the  course, 
probably,  of  the  third  century.     As  late  as  350  this  literature 
shows  no   trace   of   the  Catholic   Epistles,  still   less  of  the 
Apocalypse.     Since  this  very  Apocalypse  had  been  held  in  such 
high  esteem  in  Eome  *  from  time  immemorial,'  Edessa  can- 
not have  drawn  upon  Eoman  sources  for  her  original  Canon, 
but,  as   might   be  expected,  upon  neighbouring  Greek  com- 
munities which  had  already  rejected  the  Apocalypse  and  not 

1  See  above,  p.  493. 


540     AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  m. 

yet  admitted  the  Catholic  Epistles.  No  Syrian  distinguishes 
between  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  and  the  other  Epistles  of 
Paul.  This,  in  itself,  is  evidence  for  the  dependence  of  Syria 
on  the  Hellenic  East.  That  Philemon,  which  is  never  quoted 
by  the  earlier  Syrians,  was  ever  wanting  in  their  Canon  is 
improbable,  for  if  this  Epistle  had  been  received  as  part  and 
parcel  of  a  large  collection,  it  could  not  have  been  rejected  again 
without  strong  reason.  On  the  other  hand,  we  learn  for 
certain  from  the  quotations  of  Aphraates  and  of  Ephraim 
that  the  body  of  Paul's  writings  was  more  extensive  in  the 
Syrian  Church  than  elsewhere.  It  contained  a  further  corre- 
spondence between  Paul  and  the  Corinthian  church  (composed 
of  scraps  of  other  canonical  material,  wretchedly  pieced 
together) — including,  therefore,  a  third  Epistle  of  Paul  to 
the  Corinthians,  and  the  reply  of  the  community.  Apart 
from  this,  the  ancient  Syrians  had  a  remarkable  preference 
for  Apocrypha.  These  they  borrowed  in  great  quantities 
from  the  Greeks — Gospels,  Apocalypses,  legends  and  teaching 
of  the  Apostles — using  them  for  their  edification  with  a  piety 
not  unlike  that  of  Priscillian.  But  later  on  a  general  purging 
took  place  on  the  strictest  lines :  and  to  this  the  false 
Corinthian  Epistles  fell  victims.  Until  a  short  time  ago  our 
only  knowledge  of  these  was  drawn  from  the  re-translation  in 
the  Armenian  Bible,  which  did  not  reject  them  ;  but  in  1891 
Berger  and  Carriere  were  able  to  publish  an  original  Latin 
text  of  them  from  a  Milanese  Bible-manuscript,  containing 
more  primitive  characteristics  than  the  Armenian.  And  now 
C.  Schmidt  and  Harnack  have  made  it  certain  that  these 
inferior  Epistles  owe  their  origin  to  the  Greek  Acts  of  Paul, 
belonging  to  the  second  century. 

Thus  the  Syrian  New  Testament,  about  the  year  350,  is 
on  a  far  lower  plane  of  development  than  either  the  Greek  or 
the  Latin  ;  it  lacks  all  the  Catholic  Epistles,  and  the  Syrians 
are  unwilling  to  sacrifice  the  old  '  Diatessaron '  for  the  four 
Gospels ;  with  regard  to  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  and  the 
Apocalypse,  they  agree  with  the  majority  of  the  Greeks,  but 
they  possess  certain  Apocryphal  writings  which  the  Greeks 
treated  as  of  no  account. 


§42.]    FINAL  SETTLKMKNT  OP  N.  TEST.  IN  LATIN  CHURCH    541 

§  42.  The  Final  Settlement  of  the  New  Testament  in  the 
Latin  Church 

1.  The  settlement  was  brought  about  in  the  West  by 
means  of  a  small  concession  to  the  Greek  Church.  To  the 
Greek  Church,  not  to  its  theology ;  for  Kufinus,1  the  faithful 
friend  of  the  Alexandrian  school,  found  no  one  in  the  Latin 
world  to  follow  his  attempt  to  establish  three  classes  :  Canoni- 
cal, Ecclesiastical,  and  Apocryphal  books.  More  important 
than  this  attempt  is  the  fact  that  all  the  twenty- seven  books 
of  our  New  Testament  of  to-day  were  even  then  to  be 
found  in  his  first  class.  Indeed,  it  was  then,  about  400,  that 
the  incorporation  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  into  the 
body  of  Pauline  writings  was  finally  accomplished.  About 
the  year  390,  Philastrius  of  Brescia,  confuter  of  heretics, 
could  name 2  in  the  list  of  *  Scriptures  '  of  the  New  Testament, 
authenticated  (!)by  the  blessed  Apostles  and  their  followers, 
thirteen  Pauline  beside  the  seven  Catholic  Epistles,  passing 
over  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  and  even  the  Apocalypse  in 
absolute  silence.  But,  as  he  elsewhere  recognised  Hebrews 
as  Pauline  and  the  Apocalypse  as  Apostolic,  this  list  only 
shows  that  he  was  not  yet  accustomed  to  speak  of  fourteen 
Epistles  of  Paul.  The  decision  in  this  case  is  brought 
about  by  Jerome  and  Augustine,  the  latter  being  to  a 
certain  extent  influenced  by  Jerome,  who  for  his  part  had 
not  made  a  study  of  Greek  theology  in  vain.  Jerome  knew 
from  Ensebius  how  many  books  of  the  New  Testament 
had  been  considered  '  doubtful ' ;  he  knew  that  even  then, 
in  the  East,  some  writings  of  the  early  Church,  such  as  Hermas 
and  1.  Clement,  stood  very  close  to  the  New  Testament ;  but 
he  makes  no  practical  use  of  this  knowledge.  When,  how- 
ever, he  could  advantageously  quote  the  Apocalypse  or  one  of 
the  Catholic  Epistles  as  an  authority,  he  did  so  ;  and,  although 
he  often  used  some  cautious  formula  in  introducing  passages 
from  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  he  soon  began  to  quote  it 
more  and  more  frequently,  with  the  utmost  solemnity,  as 
6  The  Epistle  of  the  Apostle  Paul.'  Augustine,  too,  still 
used  the  older  and  more  reserved  expression,  '  the  Epistle 

1  t410.  •  Chap.  Ixxxviii. 


542     AN   INTRODUCTION    TO    THE   NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  m. 

with  the  title :  to  the  Hebrews,'  but  in  the  official  list  in  his 
De  Doctrina  Christiana,  ii.  8,  he  reckoned  fourteen  Epistles 
of  Paul,  and  among  them,  the  last  in  the  list,  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews.  Most  important  of  all,  the  African  Synods,  inspired 
by  Augustine,  published  at  Hippo  Eegius  in  the  year  393,  and 
at  Carthage  in  397  and  419,  lists  of  the  Scriptures  as  Church 
Laws,  which  give  the  New  Testament  in  its  present  compass, 
with  this  noticeable  difference,  that,  while  the  lists  before  400 
ran  :  thirteen  Epistles  of  the  Apostle  Paul  and  one  to  the 
Hebrews  by  the  same  Apostle  ;  in  419  the  fourteeen  Epistles 
of  Paul  are  simply  bracketed  together.  On  this  point  the 
example  of  the  Bishop  of  Eome  was  followed — for  Africa  was 
very  careful  to  make  sure  that  Korne  agreed  with  her 
decisions — for  in  405  Innocent  I.  had  issued  a  rescript  ad- 
dressed to  the  Bishop  of  Toulouse,  in  which  he  briefly 
specified  the  fourteen  Epistles  of  the  Apostle  Paul  among  the 
twenty-seven  books  of  the  New  Testament.  The  *  Epistolae 
Johannis  III.'  follows  immediately  upon  this,  so  that  the 
Apostolic  authorship  of  the  three  Epistles  of  John  was  posi- 
tively enunciated  from  Home,  and  the  distinction  founded 
on  individual  erudition  and  accepted  by  Pope  Damasus,1 
between  the  Apostle,  author  of  the  First  Epistle  of  John,  and 
the  presbyter,  author  of  the  Second  and  Third  Epistles,  was 
abandoned.  The  Apostolic  inheritance  was  completely  included 
in  those  twenty-seven  books.  From  that  time  onward  the 
watchword  was  :  *  Nothing  more  and  nothing  less.'  Kome 
and  Africa  alike  were  vigilant  to  secure  its  universal  accep- 
tance, and  the  more  rapid  the  success  of  the  *  nothing  less,' 
the  stronger  the  logical  necessity  to  insist  upon  the  '  nothing 
more  ' ;  hence  from  now  onwards  the  Catalogue  of  the  '  Re- 
jected,' the  pseudo- Apostolic  and  pseudo-Scriptural  books  of 
the  New  Testament,  became  a  form  of  literature  in  great 
request.  Innocent,  indeed,  mentions  to  his  Gallican  friend 
the  more  important  issues,  which  the  latter  must  not  only 
avoid,  but  condemn.2 

2.  However,  it  would  be  a  great  mistake  to  represent  the 
question  of  the  Canon  as  finally  settled  in  all  Western 
Christian  communities  by  about  the  year  400.  The  Church 

1  1 386.  2  See  pp.  563  fol. 


§  -J±]    FINAL  SETTLKMKXT  OF  N.  TEST.    IN  LATIN   CHURCH    543 

has  made  her  decision,  Augustine's  authority  in  Latin 
Christendom  being  so  overwhelming  that  there  can  be  no 
further  official  debate  as  to  the  legal  boundaries  of  the  New 
Testament ;  but  the  written  law  is  far  from  having  managed 
to  extinguish  at  one  stroke  the  opposing  rights  of  custom. 
I  am  not  referring  here  to  learned  traditions  among  the 
literary  historians  touching  '  disputed  '  and  '  recognised  ' 
Scriptures ;  Junilius,  with  his  three  classes  of  authorities,1 
belongs  least  of  all,  language  notwithstanding,  to  the  repre- 
sentatives of  the  Western  Church.  But  the  manuscripts  of 
the  Epistles  of  Paul  (and  of  entire  Bibles  also)  which  did  not 
include  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  were  not  so  quickly  en- 
larged, or  rather  replaced  by  complete  copies,  as  to  enable  this 
Epistle  actually  and  everywhere  to  take  the  place  which  was 
officially  recognised  as  its  own.  We  shall  not  be  surprised  to 
find  that  many  *  Fathers  '  of  the  next  age  are  not  yet  fully 
acquainted  with  it,  and  that  a  Catalogue  of  the  '  old  transla- 
tion '  accessible  to  Cassiodorius  only  sets  forth  the  twenty-six 
books  of  the  New  Testament ;  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews 
being  probably  the  one  omitted,  as  the  full  number  of  the 
seven  Catholic  Epistles  is  given.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
German  tribes,  especially  the  West-Goths,  had  brought  Bibles 
with  them  from  the  East  to  Spain  and  the  south  of  France, 
and  when  they  went  over  to  the  orthodox  church  they  did 
not  at  once  lightly  abandon  their  traditions ;  thus  in  the 
Spanish  Synod  the  opponents  of  the  Apocalypse  were  still 
being  combated  after  the  year  600 !  Again,  books  which 
the  Greek  and  Latin  Churches  abhorred  were  still  retained 
through  individual  affection  in  particular  communities.  Not 
to  mention  Priscillian's  predilection  for  the  Apocrypha,  we 
know  of  one  such  case  from  Augustine,  who  reproaches2  a 
certain  presbyter  because  writings  not  included  in  the 
ecclesiastical  Canon  were  publicly  read  in  his  community. 
No  doubt  similar  cases  often  occurred  of  which  we  have  no 
record.  The  history  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Laodiceans 
offers  the  most  remarkable  example  of  the  long-continued 
elasticity  of  the  limits  of  the  New  Testament,  even  in  the 
Western  Church,  in  spite  of  all  the  Eescripts  of  Bishops  and 

1  See  p.  9.  2  Epistola,  Ixiv.  3. 


544     AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP  in. 

the  decrees  of  Councils.  The  Epistle  in  question  is  short, 
unimportant  and  colourless.  It  was  supposed  to  be  written 
by  Paul  to  the  Church  of  Laodicea  [  ;  Priscillian  undoubtedly 
made  use  of  it,  and  in  the  so-called  pseudo-Augustinian  '  Specu- 
lum,' -  which  is  certainly  later  than  Augustine,  it  takes  the 
place  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  which  is  wanting ;  nu- 
merous manuscripts  of  the  Vulgate  include  it ;  and  the  Greek 
Church,  which  had  been  offered  the  Epistle  in  its  own  tongue, 
took  occasion  to  issue  a  decree  condemning  such  folly.  It  is 
not  so  much  the  energy  of  the  Church  as  the  growth  of  histori- 
cal judgment  through  the  study  of  Jerome's  and  Augustine's 
writings,  which  again  banished  this  intruder  from  the  Latin 
Biblb  before  the  end  of  the  Middle  Ages. 


§  43.  The  Final  Settlement  of  the  New  Testament  in  the 
Greek  Church 

1.  The  Greek  Church  appears  to  have  overcome  the  un- 
satisfactory condition  of  her  New  Testament,  as  set  forth  by 
Eusebius,  with  surprising  rapidity.  We  possess  several  lists  of 
the  sacred  books  dating  from  the  fourth  century  :  one  by  Cyril 
of  Jerusalem :J  in  his  '  Catecheses ' 4 ;  one  by  Athanasius 5  in  his 
thirty-ninth  Easter  Epistle  (A.D.  367) ;  one  by  Epiphanius (; 
in  the  *  Panarion  '  (§  76)  ;  and  two  metrical  lists  by  Gregory  of 
Nazianzus 7  and  his  contemporary  Amphilochius  of  Iconiurn. 
To  these  we  may  add,  possibly,  the  so-called  eighty-fifth 
Apostolic  Canon,  and  more  probably  the  so-called  sixtieth 
Laodicean  Canon,  although  this  may  not  have  been  attached 
until  later  to  the  fifty-ninth  Canon  of  a  Laodicean  Synod, 
held  about  360,  which  only  issued  a  general  condemna- 
tion of  the  practice  of  reading  the  uncanonical  books  in 
the  churches.  Among  these  catalogists  Amphilochius  alone 
considers  himself  bound  to  follow  Origen  and  Eusebius  as 
a  detailed  statistician  ;  here,  however,  he  is  peculiar  in 
admitting  James  as  well  as  1.  Peter  and  1.  John  among  the 

1  Col.  iv.  16.  2    §  ii.  Liber  de  Divinis  Scripturis. 

3  c.  348.  *  iv.  33,  36. 

5  The  text  in  Preuschen  :  vide  supra,  references  at  head  of  Part  II.  ad  in  it. 

9  1 403.  7  1 390. 


§  43.]  FINAL  SETTLEMENT  OP  N.  TEST.    IN    GREEK  CHURCH  545 

quite  undoubted  Catholic  Epistles.  He  regards  the  Epistle 
to  the  Hebrews  as  genuine  ;  and  therefore,  in  spite  of  occa- 
sional self-contradictions,  he  enumerates  from  the  first 
fourteen  Epistles  of  Paul ;  the  Apocalypse,  he  says,  is  declared 
by  the  majority  to  be  spurious.  Cyril,  Gregory  of  Nazianzus 
and  the  sixtieth  Canon  of  Laodicea  give  twenty-six  books  of 
the  New  Testament — those  of  to-day  without  the  Apocalypse 
— and  the  term  '  the  seven  Catholic  Epistles  '  is  already  fully 
established.  A  short  notice  is  added  as  to  the  genuineness  of 
these  books,  and  these  books  alone,  and  a  warning  given  against 
the  reading  of  false  and  harmful  works,  but  not  a  hint  appears 
of  the  existence  of  several  classes  of  Canonical  books. 

Epiphanius  is  only  distinguished  from  those  already 
mentioned  by  the  fact  that  he  concludes  by  naming  the 
Apocalypse  also  as  a  component  part  of  the  Holy  Scrip- 
tures, in  this  agreeing  with  Athanasius.  His  list  has  this 
advantage  over  the  rest,  that  it  contains  an  appendix  '  for 
the  sake  of  greater  accuracy,'  stating  that  besides  these  books 
there  were  some  others  which  were  not  Canonical,  but  were 
appointed  by  the  Fathers  to  be  read  aloud  to  the  Catechumens : 
viz.  the  '  Wisdom  of  Solomon  '  and  other  Old  Testament 
Apocrypha,  the '  Teaching  of  the  Apostles  '  and  the  '  Shepherd  ' 
of  Hermas.  To  this  sorry  condition  has  Eusebius's  second  class 
fallen,  and  that  at  best  in  a  few  Greek  communities.  Its 
contents  are  relegated  to  the  position  of  reading-books  (ava- 
yiyvcoo-Ko/jisva)  as  opposed  to  the  Canonical  Scriptures,  though 
they  are  sharply  distinguished  from  Class  III. — the  Apocryphal 
forgeries  of  heretics. 

We  can  now  understand  that  an  Alexandrian  of  the  time  of 
Athanasius  might  include  the  '  Teaching  of  the  Apostles  '  and 
Hermas,  side  by  side  with  Sirach  and  Judith,  in  a  Bible  manu- 
script intended  for  church  purposes,  but  we  can  also  understand 
that  the  position  of  books  for  public  reading  beside  the 
Canonical  books  could  not  long  have  been  maintained  in  face 
of  the  chilly  silence  of  so  many  other  Churchmen.  The  only 
question  of  importance  for  the  Greek  Church  in  the  matter 
of  the  New  Testament  now  is,  whether  the  New  Testament  of 
Athanasius  with  the  Apocalypse,  or  that  of  the  Palestinians 
without  it,  shall  prevail.  In  the  fourth  century  the  majority 

N  N 


546     AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  m. 

are  opposed  to  the  Apocalypse.  Eeally  great  theologians  are 
among  these  opponents  (for  instance,  Chrysostom  and 
Theodoretus),  and  the  mutual  jealousy  of  the  '  great '  bishops 
prevented  an  agreement  in  the  Synods.  The  Apocalypse  was 
opposed  in  Antioch  for  the  reason  that  it  was  favoured  in 
Alexandria  ;  the  heads  of  the  School  of  Antioch  ignored  it 
altogether,  if  they  did  not  incidentally  declare  it  to  be 
Apocryphal.  The  authority  of  Athanasius  and  the  wish  for 
uniformity  with  the  Western  Church  at  last  carried  the  day. 
Perhaps  during  his  long  exile  in  the  orthodox  West  Athanasius 
had  learned  to  place  a  higher  value  on  the  Apocalypse,  which, 
indeed,  had  never  been  entirely  expelled  from  Egypt ;  it  was 
a  recommendation  of  the  book  in  his  eyes,  and  in  the  eyes  of 
those  who  revered  in  him  the  only  destroyer  of  the  diabolical 
Arian  heresy,  that  the  Eastern  Arians  and  Semi-Arians  would 
have  none  of  it.  From  500  onwards  the  supporters  of  the 
Apocalypse  slowly  increased  in  Syria,  Asia  Minor,  and  Con- 
stantinople. Andrew  of  Csesarea,  the  first  Greek  to  devote 
a  commentary  to  it,  may  have  lived  as  early  as  500.  The 
fundamental  opposition  to  the  Apocalypse  had  probably  dis- 
appeared in  the  seventh  century,  when  the  Synod  of  692  T 
canonised  one  list  of  the  Canon  with,  and  one  without  it. 
The  leaders  of  the  Greek  renaissance  of  the  eighth  to  the 
tenth  centuries,  John  of  Damascus,  Photius,  Arethas  of  Cresarea, 
treated  the  Apocalypse  as  a  Canonical  book.  But  not  much 
was  gained  withal  for  the  practical  influence  of  the  book,  and 
I  do  not  think  it  accidental  that  Photius  in  his  polemic 
against  the  '  modern '  Manichaeans,  while  reproaching  them 
with  the  fact  that  they  did  not  accept  the  Pauline  Epistles, 
says  not  a  word  as  to  their  rejecting  the  Apocalypse,  which 
they  certainly  did. 

Again,  a  list  of  Scriptures  -  attributed  to  the  patriarch  Nice- 
phorus  of  Constantinople  (about  810),  but  which  was  really 
drawn  up  in  Jerusalem  about  850,  names  the  Apocalypse  of 
John  among  the  Antilegomena  of  the  New  Testament,  and  pre- 
viously reckons  the  Books  of  the  New  Testament  quite  uncon- 
cernedly at  twenty-six.  And  even  if  this  list  is  much  older,  and 
was  only  included  in  the  *  Chronography '  about  850,  it  is  still 

1  Quinisexta.  2  In  Preuschen :  vide  supra,  p.  459. 


§43.]  FINAL  SETTLKMKNT  OF   N.  TEST.    IN    (JUHKK  CUriUMl  547 

evidence  of  the  fact  that  Greek  scholars,  even  in  the  ninth 
•century,  found  no  difficult}'  in  speaking  of  the  twenty-six  Books 
of  the  New  Testament.  The  phrases  with  which  the  very  late 
pseudo-Athanasian  Synopsis  includes  the  Apocalypse  of  John 
among  the  New  Testament  Books  ]  are  characteristic.  Even  in 
the  tenth  century  complete  manuscripts  of  the  New  Testament 
were  occasionally  prepared  without  the  Apocalypse.  Conse- 
quently, as  we  see  that  the  Greek  Church  remained  from  the 
first  behind  the  Latin  in  denning  her  Canonical  material— 
although  every  impulse  to  enrich  the  Canon  proceeded  from 
her — so  we  find  that  with  her  the  final  settlement  is  far  more 
difficult  to  accomplish.  The  same  twenty-seven  books  which 
were  firmly  established  in  the  West,  from  about  the  year  400, 
as  the  component  parts  of  the  New  Testament,  only  received 
similar  official  sanction  in  the  East  two  or  three  centuries 
later,  and  even  then  with  an  almost  grotesque  uncertainty. 

2.  The  difference  between  the  Greek  and  Latin  Churches 
in  their  treatment  of  the  question  of  the  Canon  appears  in  yet 
another  instance.  The  catalogue  of  Eusebius  had  its  after- 
-effect on  the  School  of  Antioch,  whose  teachers  felt  little 
interest  for  the  Catholic  Epistles,  either  receiving  1.  Peter 
and  1.  John  only,  or  adding  James,  but  quite  ignoring  the  rest. 
It  is  even  said  that  Theodore  of  Mopsuestia  rejected  all  the 
Catholic  Epistles.  This  would  not  be  quite  incredible,  since 
-about  the  year  545  Cosmas  Indicopleustes,  in  Book  vii.  of  his 
'  Christian  Topography,'  advises  that  no  recourse  be  had  to 
the  Catholic  Epistles,  calling  them  '  Amphiballomena  ' ;  and 
definitely  asserts  that  even  1.  John  and  1.  Peter  were  considered 
by  many  as  writings  of  *  Presbyters,'  not  of  Apostles.  Since 
the  holders  of  such  theories  included  influential  bishops,  their 
position  in  the  matter  cannot  have  been  without  influence 
on  the  custom  of  their  churches  ;  in  the  Greek  part  of  Syria 
the  Catholic  Epistles  were  considered  by  the  majority  at  any 
rate  as  only  authorities  of  the  second  order. 

It  is  an  exaggeration  to  infer  an  absolute  deadening  of 
interest  in  the  strict  delimitation  of  the  Bible,  from  the  cool 
tone  in  which  the  Greek  Canonists  from  the  twelfth  century 

1  e*l  rovrois  fcrr\  /cot  etc. ;  just  as  the  Scilitanian  Acts  speak  of  the  Epistles 
-of  Paul. 

N    X    2 


548     AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  m. 

onwards  (e.g.  John  Zonaras)  treated  the  various  opinions  as  to 
the  compass  of  the  New  Testament.  Even  in  the  West  the  (50) 
'  Apostolic  Canons '  are  occasionally  included  in  the  New  Tes- 
tament ;  the  Canon  of  Mabillon,  from  a  Codex  Bobbiensis,1 
deliberately  reckons  twenty-eight  books  of  the  New  Testament, 
placing  after  the  four  Gospels  a  liber  sacrament  or  um — a  Mass- 
book  of  some  sort.  (Harnack's  emendation, '  secretorum  uno  * 
[=Actus  Pauli],  cannot  be  accepted,  owing  to  the  position  after 
the  four  Gospels.)  Again,  in  Gaul  in  the  fifth  century  the 
Actus  Pauli  were  still  retained  in  the  New  Testament ;  while 
up  to  the  thirteenth  century  Church  historians  of  repute 
were  among  those  who  recognised  fifteen  Epistles  of  Paul— 
that  is,  who  admitted  the  Epistle  to  the  Laodiceans  as  genu- 
ine. Express  rejection  of  the  apocryphon  as  a  forgery  is  rarer 
than  its  grateful  acceptance.  In  this  instance  the  East  is  only 
a  few  degrees  more  careless  than  was  the  West  down  to  the 
sixteenth  century.  Thus  the  table  of  contents  of  Codex  A  - 
added  to  the  New  Testament  1.  and  2.  Clement.  John  of  Damas- 
cus3 reckoned  the  'Canons  of  the  Holy  Apostles'  (he  appends 
Sia  K\7jfjb£vros)  among  the  New  Testament  Books.  The  last 
(85th)  of  these  Canons  names  before  the  Acts,  as  belonging 
to  the  New  Testament,  two  Epistles  of  Clement,  and  the '  ordi- 
nances which  I,  Clement,  have  issued  to  you,  the  bishops,  in 
eight  books  '  ('  Constitutions  Apostolorum '),  although  the 
following  qualification  is  added, '  these  must  not  be  made  public 
to  all  on  account  of  the  secret  things  (TO,  h  avrals  HVO-TLKCI) 
which  they  contain.'  Antilegomena  of  the  New  Testament 
reappear  in  the  Stichometry  of  Nicephorus,4  viz.  side  by 
side  with  the  Apocalypse  of  John,  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter, 
Barnabas,  and  the  Gospel  of  the  Hebrews.  Here,  too,  the 
'  Teaching  of  the  Apostles,'  1.  and  2.  Clement,  and  Hermas 
figure  among  the  apocrypha  of  the  New  Testament,  while  the 
pseudo-Athanasian  Synopsis  names  the  '  Teaching  of  the 
Apostles '  and  the  *  dementia '  as  New  Testament  Antilego- 
mena (or  books  for  public  reading  ! )  beside  certain  extremely 
questionable  documents— though  with  the  qualification  '  from 
which  only  the  truest  and  the  inspired  parts  have  been 

1  Of  c.  600.  *  See  §  52,  "1.  J  r.  730. 

4  See  p.  546. 


$  44.]  FINAL  SETTLEMENT  OF  N.  T.  IN  EASTERN  CHURCHES    649 

written  out  after  careful  selection.'  We  have  here  the  un- 
mistakable attempt  to  clothe  the  books  of  ecclesiastical  law 
with  Canonical  authority  ;  and  thus  we  can  well  understand 
that  the  Copts  and  Ethiopians  (including  the  Abyssinians), 
who  drew  all  their  ideas  from  Alexandria,  included  their  legal 
codes  directly  in  their  New  Testament,  so  that  the  Ethiopian 
New  Testament  contained  thirty-five  books.  If  the  identity 
between  Apostolic  and  Canonical  were  strictly  insisted  on,  and 
if  Apostolic  rank  were  claimed  for  the  greatest  existing  sources 
of  the  law,  it  was  only  logical  to  canonise  the  Apostolic  '  Con- 
stitutions '  and  the  like  ;  to  be  consistent,  the  West  should  have 
done  the  same  with  its  *  Apostolic '  Symbolum.  But  when  this 
idea  arose  there  was  no  room  left  in  the  New  Testament ; 
and  the  Greek  Church,  instead  of  the  '  Apostolicum,'  had  the 
'  Nicaenum,'  the  origin  of  which  did  not  permit  of  such 
treatment. 


5  44.  The  Final  Settlement  of  the  New  Testament  in  the 
national  Churches  of  the  East 

When  the  rich  remains  of  Syrian  literature  shall  have 
been  thoroughly  examined  and  made  universally  accessible,  a 
continuous  history  of  the  New  Testament  among  the  Syrians 
(on  whom  the  other  national  Churches  of  the  East,  the 
Persian  and  the  Armenian,  are  dependent)  may  probably 
be  written,  from  the  earliest  times  down  to  our  own  clay. 
Until  that  time  we  must  content  ourselves  with  indicating  the 
few  perfectly  certain  points.  Through  Cosmas  ]  we  know 
that  there  were  only  three  Catholic  Epistles  in  the  Syrian 
Canon,  James,  1.  Peter  and  1.  John ;  this  agrees  with 
the  state  of  the  case  in  the  Syrian  translation  of  the 
Bible,  the  Peshitto.  In  its  present  state  this  document  can- 
not be  older  than  the  fourth  century ;  thus  the  only  certain 
inference  it  affords  is  that  the  Syrian  Church  of  the  fourth 
century  possessed  a  New  Testament  of  twenty-two  books 
Jude,  2.  Peter,  2.  and  3.  John  and  the  Apocalypse  being  absent. 
We  do  not  know  when  the  Syrians  gave  up'  the  pseudo- 
Corinthian  correspondence ;  it  can  scarcely  have  been  before 

1  See  p.  547. 


550      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT 

the  fifth  century.  The  breath  of  criticism  from  Antioch 
swept  away  the  Apocrypha :  to  the  same  cause  may  be 
ascribed  the  resistance  offered  in  Syria  to  an  enlargement  of 
the  New  Testament  by  the  addition  of  the  Apocalypse  (which 
was  certainly  known  to  Ephraim)  and  the  four  minor  Catholic 
Epistles.  Even  James  is  again  somewhat  thrust  into  the 
shade ;  at  least  in  the  great  School  of  Nisibis,  according  to 
Junilius,1  after  the  Epistles  of  Paul,  only  1.  Peter  and  1.  John 
are  recognised  as  absolutely  authoritative  books,  while  the 
other  five — and  still  more  the  Apocalypse, '  which  is  considered 
very  doubtful  by  the  Orientals  '—enjoy  but  a  secondary 
rank.  Probably  it  seemed  enough  at  Nisibis  that  theo- 
logians should  be  acquainted  with  such  debated  writings  ; 
the  laity  were  offered  only  those  which  possessed  the  highest 
authority.  Since  the  East  Syrian  Church  subscribed  to 
Nestorianism  (condemned  from  the  time  of  the  Council  of 
Ephesus  in  431)  and  was  thus  entirely  cut  off  from  the 
neighbouring  Western  Churches,  we  can  scarcely  imagine  any 
motive  which  could  induce  it  to  complete  its  New  Testament 
after  the  pattern  of  the  Greek ;  we  cannot  be  surprised 
that  a  Syrian  manuscript  (probably  East  Syrian)  of  the  year 
1470,  formally  concludes  its  New  Testament  with  the  Pauline 
Epistles,  and  then  proceeds  :  '  We  here  add  to  the  Epistles  of 
Paul  the  Epistles  of  the  Apostles  which  are  not  to  be  found 
in  all  the  Codices.'  Then  follow  2.  Peter,  2.  and  3.  John, 
Jude,  and  the  two  '  Clementine  '  Epistles  on  Virginity. 

In  West  Syria  Monophysitism  prevailed.  The  Syrian 
Monophysites  kept  up  a  lively  correspondence  with  those  of 
like  mind  among  the  Greeks  and  Copts  ;  the  respect  for  the 
authority  of  Greek  tradition,  which  led  them  about  500  to 
undertake  a  more  accurate  translation  of  the  original  text 
than  the  Peshitto,  was  also  the  occasion  of  their  increasing 
their  three  Catholic  Epistles  to  seven,  in  accordance  with  the 
Greek  MSS.  But  even  the  second  and  revised  edition  of 
that  translation  (that  of  616),  which  is  better  known  to  us, 
did  not,  apparently,  originally  include  the  Apocalypse,  which 
was  added  later,  and  at  last  found  its  way  into  the  Peshitto 
manuscripts  together  with  the  four  minor  Catholic  Epistles. 

1  See  p.  0. 


§45.]      NEW    TESTAMENT    CANON    IN   REFORMATION    AGE       551 

The  Monophysite  Dionysius  Bar  Salibi  (fllTl)  wrote  com- 
mentaries on  the  Apocalypse,  the  Acts,  seven  Catholic  and  four- 
teen Pauline  Epistles,  in  exactly  the  same  style  as  on  the  four 
Gospels.  The  anti-Chalcedonian  Armenians  imitated  their 
Syrian  brethren  ;  but  the  anxiety  of  the  Westerns  as  to  the 
separation  of  the  Canonical  from  other  early  Christian  litera- 
ture is  not  to  be  found  among  any  Orientals.  As  the  Armenians 
were  edified  by  3.  Corinthians,  so  a  certain  Syrian  Bible-Codex 
written  at  Edessa  in  1170  placed  the  Epistles  of  Clement  of 
Rome  (but  not  the  '  De  Virginitate ')  between  Jude  and  Romans 
as  Canonical  books,  and  even  provided  them  with  a  system  of 
pericopic  subdivision  ! 

§  45.  The  Maintenance  of  the  New  Testament  Canon 
in  the  Age  of  the  Reformation 

1.  The  Reformation  of  the  sixteenth  century  shook  the 
established  Canon  to  its  foundations  ;  the  Reformed  Churches 
removed  a  number  of  books  from  the  Old  Testament  entirely, 
the  Lutherans  partially,  branding  them  as  '  Apocryphal.'  It 
seemed  for  some  time  as  though  the  New  Testament  was 
destined  to  undergo  similar  treatment.  *  Humanism  '  had 
already  brought  forward  long-forgotten  facts  as  to  the  history 
of  the  Canon ;  not  only  did  Erasmus  of  Rotterdam  question 
the  authenticity  of  Hebrews,  2.  Peter,  James,  2.  and  3.  John  and 
the  Apocalypse— though  without  challenging  their  canonicity, 
and  prepared  throughout  to  condemn  such  doubts  as  soon  as 
the  Church  should  have  decided  definitely  that  not  only  the 
contents,  but  the  titles  of  these  books  were  unassailable — but 
even  the  Cardinal  Gaetano,1  the  celebrated  opponent  of 
Luther,  entertained  great  mistrust  of  Hebrews,  James,  2.  and 
3.  John,  and  Jude,  and  therefore  concluded  that  their  authority 
was  inferior.  If  Hebrews  were  not  written  by  Paul,  its  canoni- 
city was  not  assured,  and  a  doubtful  question  of  faith  could 
not  be  decided  on  the  authority  of  this  Epistle  alone.  Sixtus 
of  Siena 2  still  speaks  of  seven  deutero-canonical  writings  of  the 
New  Testament,  and  the  Jesuit  Bellarmine  repeated  it  after 
him,  but  perhaps  simply  in  order  to  stamp  it  as  a  piece  of 
learned  lore.  For  within  the  province  of  the  Roman  Catholic 

1  1 1534.  2  See  p.  10. 


552      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAJMII. 

Church  the  question  of  the  Canon  had  meanwhile  been  set  at 
rest  for  ever.  The  (Ecumenical  Council  of  Trent,  at  its  fourth 
sitting,  on  April  8,  1546,  had  declared  the  whole  contents  of  the 
Vulgate,  definitely  enumerating  the  twenty-seven  books  of  the 
New  Testament — among  them  '  Pauli  Apostoli  ad  Hebraeos  ' 
and  '  Jacobi  Apostoli  [!]  una  ' — to  be  Divine  (that  is,  sacred 
and  Canonical)  without  admitting  any  difference  of  degree 
between  the  constituent  parts.  In  order  to  defend  interpola- 
tions agreeable  to  the  Church,  such  as  Mark  xvi.  9  fol.  and 
the  '  Comma  Johanneum  '  (see  §  51,  3),  this  canonisation 
was  expressly  extended  to  '  the  books  in  their  entirety,  with 
all  their  parts,  as  they  are  habitually  read  in  the  Catholic 
Church,  and  as  they  are  to  be  found  in  the  ancient  Latin 
edition  of  the  Vulgate.'  Since  then,  in  cases  where  the 
scientific  consciousness  of  a  Roman  Catholic  still  compels 
opposition  to  a  portion  of  the  Vulgate  tradition,  he  must  be 
content  with  challenging  the  primitiveness,  the  authenticity,  of 
a  verse,  a  section,  a  book  of  the  New  Testament,  and  take 
comfort  in  the  thought  that  the  authority  and  canonicity  of  a 
passage  in  the  Bible  has  nothing  to  do  with  its  genuineness. 
This  servitude  corresponds  to  the  nature  of  the  Roman  Catholic 
Church  ;  but  it  would  never  have  been  so  openly  proclaimed, 
had  not  the  fearless  criticism  employed  by  the  German  revolu- 
tionaries against  the  Holy  Scripture  itself  compelled  the  tra- 
ditional Church  to  define  the  limits  of  what  it  held  to  be 
Canonical  with  absolute  accuracy. 

2.  The  criticism  which  Luther  brought  to  bear  upon  the 
traditional  New  Testament  was  not  from  the  historic,  but  from 
the  dogmatic,  or,  more  precisely,  from  the  religious  side. 
Personal  experience  and  study  of  the  Scriptures  gradually  con- 
vinced him  that  the  Gospel,  faith  and  salvation  had  been  utterly 
distorted  in  the  corrupt  theology  of  his  time ;  that  the  truth, 
as  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  and  the  Apostles  had  delivered  it  to  us, 
was  far  removed  from  the  teaching  of  the  Church.  This  he  was 
prepared  to  prove  from  the  Holy  Scriptures  themselves  ;  and 
with  the  consciousness  of  power  which  marks  religious  genius, 
he  raised  his  own  understanding  of  Paul  and  John  into  the 
standard  by  which  everything  reputed  sacred  and  Divine 
must  be  tried.  Thereafter  he  measured  the  Scripture  by  the 


x<   I').]      NEW    TESTAMENT   CANON    IN   REFORMATION    AGE       553 

Scripture,  and  from  1519  onwards,  and  most  forcibly  in  his 
treatises  on  the  German  New  Testament  in  1522,  contrasted 
the  '  well-assured,  principal  books' — above  all,  John,  Romans 
and  Galatians — with  other  books  in  the  New  Testament 
deserving  of  open  blame,  namely  Hebrews,  Jude,  James  and 
the  Apocalypse.  The  teaching  of  Hebrews  as  to  the  Atone- 
ment was  false  :  possibly  Apollos  might  have  written  it ; 
Jude  was  unnecessary  beside  2.  Peter  ;  as  for  the  Apocalypse, 
he  could  not  see  '  that  it  was  inspired  by  the  Holy 
Ghost.'  But,  above  all,  the  Epistle  of  James  was  a  thing  of 
straw,  which  gave  to  works  the  power  of  justification,  in  direct 
opposition  to  Paul,  and  sought  to  teach  Christian  people 
without  reminding  them  of  the  sufferings  of  Christ. 

Zwingli  also  called  the  Apocalypse  a  '  non-Biblical  book,' 
and  considered  Hebrews,  from  religious  motives,  as  non- 
Pauline  ;  (Ecolampadius  (1530)  admits  a  '  slighter  authority  ' 
for  the  Apocalypse,  James,  Jude,  2.  Peter  and  3.  John,  while  even 
Calvin  showed  plainly  that  he  had  doubts  as  to  the  Epistle  to 
the  Hebrews,  2.  and  3.  John,  2.  Peter  and  the  Apocalypse, 
though  these  doubts  were  in  the  main  based  on  the  history  of 
the  Canon.  The  typical  representative  of  this  kind  of  '  criti- 
cism '  of  the  Canon  is  Carlstadt,  who  in  1520  wrote  a  '  Libellus 
de  Canonicis  Scripturis,'  publishing  a  German  abstract  of  it  at 
the  same  time.  In  this,  while  rigidly  enforcing  the  idea  of 
inspiration,  he  met  the  historical  facts  by  distinguishing  three 
classes  of  Authorities  among  the  Books  of  the  New  Testament 
as  well  as  of  the  Old  :  (1)  those  of  the  highest  dignity  :  the  four 
Gospels  ;  (2)  those  of  the  second  order :  the  Acts,  thirteen 
Epistles  of  Paul,  1.  Peter  and  1.  John  ;  (3)  the  third  and  lowest 
both  in  authority  and  celebrity :  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  the 
Apocalypse,  and  five  Catholic  Epistles.  He  hoped  by  this  means 
to  have  cut  away  the  ground  from  that  subjectivism  which 
judged  of  Biblical  Books  according  to  individual  religious  taste, 
and  to  have  substituted  for  it  a  criticism  founded  on  history. 
In  reality,  as  regards  the  New  Testament,  he  slavishly  sub- 
mitted to  the  same  Catholic  tradition  which,  by  the  aid  of  this 
New  Testament,  he  had  thought  to  cast  off  as  miserable  human 
handiwork.  It  was  not  the  Protestant  spirit  that  stirred  in 
Carlstadt's  '  Libellus  ' ;  a  learned  Nestorian  might  have  put 


554     AN    INTRODUCTION  TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  nr. 

forward  essentially  the  same  ideas.  Moreover,  Carlstadt  de- 
manded a  universal  recognition  for  his  theses,  while  Luther 
forbade  no  man  to  think  as  his  own  spirit  taught  him  with  re- 
gard to  the  books  he  held  in  least  esteem  :  indeed  he  translated 
and  spread  abroad  the  disputed  writings  just  as  he  did  the 
above-mentioned  '  principal  books.' 

However,  such  a  freedom  of  decision  could  not  remain  open 
to  an  Evangelical  Church,  any  more  than  could  Carlstadt's 
division  into  different  orders,  if  the  idea  of  inspiration  was  to 
be  taken  up  seriously  and  stretched  to  its  extreme  limits.  Among 
the  Eeforiners,  Beza  l  stands  at  the  end  of  the  epoch  in  which 
the  genuineness,  the  Apostolic  title,  of  any  book  of  the  New 
Testament  could  be  called  in  question.  In  the  Lutheran  Church 
an  echo  of  Luther's  forcible  words  was  to  be  heard  until  about 
1700.  M.  Chemnitius  described  the  Antilegomena  as  New 
Testament  Apocrypha  of  insufficient  authority  ;  here  again  we 
find  the  '  objective '  criticism,  springing  from  real  historical 
knowledge,  not  the  subjective  religious  criticism  of  Luther  ; 
hence  he  decides  on  seven,  not  four,  Antilegomena  ;  hence,  too, 
a  lasting  success  was  impossible  for  his  conclusions  within  the 
religious  community.  The  stiffest  Lutherans,  however,  shared 
his  point  of  view,  and  with  remarkable  complacency  discussed 
the  question  as  to  what  was  to  be  said  for  or  against  the  Apo- 
stolic origin  of  these  books :  that  is,  of  their  authorship  by 
inspired  instruments.  The  Lutheran  scholastics  of  the  seven- 
teenth century  still  spoke  of  Canonical  books  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment of  the  second  order,  or  of  deutero-canonical  books.  But 
this  terminology  disappeared  even  with  them  about  1700,  and 
rightly  so,  since  no  logical  conclusions  affecting  dogma  could  be 
drawn  from  it.  Equal  qualities,  an  equally  high  authority, 
were  allotted  to  all  the  twenty-seven  Books  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment :  thus  even  through  the  storms  of  the  Eeformation  the 
original  New  Testament  held  its  own. 

And  here  its  history  ends.  Although  since  then  theological 
science  may  have  given  its  verdict  against  the  Apostolic 
origin  of  many  a  New  Testament  Book — although  it  may  have 
fundamentally  transformed  the  conception  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment Canon,  or  indeed  all  the  conceptions  which  are  bound 

1  tioos. 


§46.]         VARIANT    ORDKtt    OF    M-:\V    TI1STAMKNT    BOOKS          555 

up  with  it— for  the  past  three  hundred  years  no  one  has 
dreamt  of  altering  the  New  Testament  of  the  Church,  either 
by  diminishing  or  increasing  it,  or  by  marking  out  different 
degrees  within  it.  Since  Luther  and  the  earlier  Lutherans, 
the  dogma  of  the  Canon  and  the  historical  criticism  of  the  New 
Testament  Books,  have  indeed  had  their  histories,  but  not  the 
New  Testament  Canon  itself,  not  the  collection  as  such. 
The  text  alone,  the  wording  of  certain  passages,  still  continues 
to  develop  and  to  take  new  forms. 

§  46.  The  Variations  in  the  Order  of  the  different  Parts 
of  the  New  Testament 

[Cf.  T.  Zahn,  '  Gesch.  des  N.T  lichen  Kanons,'  ii.  343-383,  and 
S.  Berger,  '  Histoire  de  la  Vulgate  '  (1893),  pp.  301-6  and  331-42.] 

1.  A  glance  at  the  Lutheran  Bible  will  show  that  such  an 
apparently  indifferent  question  as  that  of  the  order  of  the 
New  Testament  Books  is  of  no  small  importance  in  the  history 
of  the  Canon.  In  it  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  stands  in  the 
midst  of  the  Catholic  Epistles,  followed  by  James,  Jude,  and 
the  Apocalypse.  Such  a  singular  arrangement  can  only  be 
explained  by  remembering  Luther's  judgment  upon  these  four 
documents  of  the  New  Testament.  In  his  eyes  they  were  not 
the  pure  metal  unalloyed,  and  he  therefore  gives  them  a  lower 
place  :  Hebrews  first,  because  the  Pauline  Epistles  preceded  the 
Catholic  ;  the  Apocalypse  last,  because  he  was  accustomed  to 
read  it  at  the  end.  In  the  oldest  editions  he  had  only  carried 
the  numbered  index  of  New  Testament  Books  as  far  as  3.  John 
(i.e.  to  No.  23) ;  the  last  four  books  were  given  no  numbers  at 
all — a  more  eloquent  witness  as  to  his  attitude  towards  them 
than  long  discussions  on  the  question  of  their  authors ! 
Except  for  this  separation  of  the  last  four,  Luther  kept  to  the 
order  usual  in  his  time.  This,  however,  only  became  perma- 
nent through  the  invention  of  printing  ;  from  that  time  on- 
wards the  Apocalypse  everywhere  forms  the  conclusion  of  the 
New  Testament,  as  the  fourfold  Gospel  forms  the  beginning  ; 
the  Acts  stand  after  the  Gospels,  and  the  only  point  which  still 
varies  is  that  most  of  the  newer  Greek  texts  place  the  Catholic 
Epistles  before,  the  Vulgate  texts  after,  the  Pauline  Epistles. 


AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  m. 

It  is  to  be  regretted,  though  perhaps  it  is  not  surprising,  that 
even  in  its  '  Novum  Testamentum  Graece '  the  new  Stuttgart 
edition  has  introduced  Luther's  order,  unsupported  as  it  is  by 
any  Greek  manuscripts. 

2.  Before  the  introduction  of  printing,  the  New  Testament 
is  found  comparatively  rarely  in  one  volume,  so  that  it  seems 
as  though  the  majority  of  the  manuscripts  could  teach  us 
nothing  as  to  the  order  of  the  whole.  But  the  manuscripts 
almost  always  include — except  in  the  case  of  the  Apocalypse 
and  the  Acts — several  connected  books,  such  as  the  four 
Gospels,  the  Pauline  or  the  Catholic  Epistles.  The  Epistle 
to  the  Galatians  was  not  copied  out  alone  any  more  than  the 
Epistle  of  Jude.  Now,  the  order  within  these  groups  shows 
variations  which  are  not  always  accidental.  With  the  Gospels 
the  present  established  order  is  very  old,1  and  has  by  far  the 
largest  amount  of  evidence  in  its  favour.  And  since  John  is 
considered  to  be  the  last-written  of  the  Gospels,  the 
time  of  writing  may  be  taken  as  the  general  principle  on 
which  these  books  are  grouped.  There  is  an  important 
deviation  from  this  principle  in  those  collections  in  which 
we  find  the  Gospel  of  John  placed  before  the  Gospels  of 
the  Apostles'  disciples 2 —  that  is,  either  after  or  even  before 
Matthew  ;  in  these  the  desire  is  to  place  the  two  Apostolic 
Gospels  together,  or  perhaps  the  Beloved  Disciple's  first  of  all. 
Other  re-arrangements,  such  as  the  placing  of  Luke  before 
Mark,  can  only  be  looked  on  as  exceptions,  and  have  no 
historical  interest. 

As  to  the  Epistles  of  Paul,  we  gather  from  the  history  of 
the  Canon  that  the  Greeks,  almost  without  exception,  placed 
the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  before  the  private  Epistles,  as 
No.  10,  sometimes  also  as  No.  4  after  2.  Corinthians, 
to  which  it  fairly  corresponds  in  length  ;  the  Westerns  almost 
as  invariably  placed  it  after  them  as  No.  14.  Even  the 
Epistle  to  the  Laodiceans  is  inserted  immediately  before  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  in  a  few  Latin  manuscripts.  As  a 
rule,  its  place  is  next  to  Colossians.  It  is  difficult  to  decide 
at  what  time  the  present  arrangement  of  Paul's  Epistles 

1  As  early  as  the  Canon  of  Muratori  and  the  Mommsenianus. 
2  E.g.,  Catal.  Claroraontanus  ;  see  p.  536. 


II 


§  46.]    VARIANT  ORDER  OF  NKU*  TESTAMENT  BOOKS    557 

replaced  the  motley  confusion  presented  by  Marcion  and  the 
Muratorianum  ;  it  took  place  before  the  fourth  century,  how- 
ever, for  Cyprian  found  it  already  existing  in  all  essentials. 
It  is  very  probable  that  the  Epistles  to  the  Churches  and  those 
to  individuals  were  at  one  time  separated,  but  otherwise 
placed  according  to  their  length :  thus  establishing  a  basis  for 
a  rough  estimate  of  their  value.  Only  in  one  point  does  the 
greater  part  of  the  Latin  evidence  differ  until  late  in  the 
Middle  Ages  from  the  Greek  tradition ;  the  Epistle  to  the 
Colossians  is  usually  placed  after  2.  Thessalonians. 

The  variations  in  the  case  of  the  Catholic  Epistles  are 
connected  with  the  gradual  growth  of  this  collection  ;  at  first 
there  were  only  1.  John  and  1.  Peter  ;  naturally  2.  and  3.  John 
and  2.  Peter  were  attached  to  their  predecessors  ;  but  when 
James  and  Jude  had  to  be  added,  it  was  necessary  to  make  some 
arbitrary  arrangement.  As  early  as  Eusebius,  James  stands 
first :  the  probable  order  of  the  rest  was  Peter,  John,  Jude, 
as  in  most  of  the  Eastern  lists,  and,  since  Jerome's  time,  in 
those  of  the  West  also  :  consideration  for  the  words  of  Gal.  ii.  9, 
'  James  and  Cephas,  and  John,  they  who  were  reputed  to  be 
pillars,'  might  have  decided  in  favour  of  this  order.  In  the 
West,  on  the  other  hand,  the  '  Canon  Mommsenianus  '  and  the 
Rescript  of  Innocent  name  John  as  the  first,  no  doubt  because 
he  was  the  Beloved  Disciple ;  otherwise  Peter  enjoys  this 
position  almost  universally  in  districts  under  Roman  sway : 
some  placing  John  immediately  afterwards,  others  (probably 
under  Greek  influence)  first  James  and  then  John  and  Jude ; 
more  rarely  James  and  Jude  first,  and  then  John  (e.g.  Ru- 
finus).  If  Jude  is  occasionally  found  in  the  West  before 
James,  the  reason  might  be  that  he  was  there  admitted  to 
the  Canon  earlier  than  James. 

3.  But  we  possess  at  any  rate  a  sufficient  number  of 
complete  Bibles  and  lists  of  the  New  Testament  Books  to 
be  able  to  pronounce  an  opinion  as  to  the  succession  of  the 
five  integral  parts — the  Gospels,  the  Acts,  the  Pauline 
Epistles,  the  Catholic  Epistles,  and  the  Apocalypse.  As  the 
Gospels  were  the  first  to  appear  in  the  Canon,  so  they  have 
always  maintained  their  place  at  the  beginning.  The  few 
exceptions  in  which  they  form  the  conclusion  to  the  New 


558      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  in. 

Testament  are  not  of  more  importance  than  the  placing  of 
Paul  by  some  Vulgate  manuscript  between  Isaiah  and  Genesis, 
or  of  the  Apocalypse,  the  Catholic  Epistles  and  the  Acts, 
between  Jeremiah  and  1.  Samuel.  The  Apocalypse  usually 
takes  the  last  place,  wherever  it  is  read  at  all ;  as  early  as 
Origen,  as  we  know,  it  follows  the  Gospels  and  the  Apostles  ; 
its  conclusion  formed  a  peculiarly  fitting  end  to  the  Holy  Scrip- 
tures, and  its  outlook  towards  the  end  of  the  world  appeared 
naturally  to  assign  it  to  the  last  place.  Codex  N  shows  the 
following  order  for  the  three  middle  portions :  Pauline 
Epistles,  Acts,  Catholic  Epistles  ;  Codex  B,  Acts,  Catholic 
Epistles,  Pauline  Epistles.  Augustine,1  followed  by  most  medi- 
aeval authorities,  including  Pope  Eugenius  IV.  in  his  Bull  of 
1441,  presents  this  order  :  Pauline  Epistles,  Catholic  Epistles, 
Acts  ;  hence  it  always  appears  that  the  Acts  and  the  Catholic 
Epistles  have  a  closer  connection  with  one  another  than  with 
Paul ;  -  as  if  in  those  two  '  all  the  Apostles  '  were  represented, 
over  against  the  one  Apostle  Paul.  When  the  order  :  Pauline 
Epistles,  Catholic  Epistles,  Acts,  was  introduced,  it  was  for  the 
sake  of  having  all  the  Epistles  together  ;  to  place  the  Pauline 
before  the  Catholic  Epistles  and  the  Acts  might  appear  more 
natural,  considering  the  course  of  the  history  of  the  Canon  ;  but 
the  final  victory  of  an  order  which  placed  the  Acts  before  the 
Epistles  was  brought  about  by  the  feeling  that  the  place  of  the 
Acts,  as  history,  was  immediately  after  the  Gospels,  them- 
selves historical  books.  That  the  Pauline  Epistles  were  finally 
placed  immediately  after  the  Acts,  thereby  deposing  the 
Catholic  Epistles,  is  due  to  their  advantage  over  the  Catholic 
in  quality  and  quantity — an  advantage  which  unintention- 
ally found  this  means  of  expression.  Thus  we  may  now 
conveniently  make  the  threefold  division  of  the  New 
Testament  into  five  books  of  history,  twenty-one  Epistles,  and 
one  book  of  Prophecy,  corresponding  to  the  order  of  subject- 
matter  in  the  Old  Testament  of  the  Greeks  ;  but  the  early 
ages,  which  looked  more  to  the  contents  than  the  form, 
attached  no  value  to  such  an  arrangement. 

It  is  characteristic  of  the  state  of  the  Canon  that  the  New 

1  De  Doctr.  Christ,  ii.  8  (13). 

-  See  Philastrius :    Quae  scptem  [i.e.  the  Cath.  Ep.]  Aclibus  Apostolorum 
conjunctac  sunt. 


§  47.]  RESULT   OF   THE    HISTORY    OF   THE   CANON  559 

Testament  could  be  arranged  in  such  various  orders  at  all ; 
it  is  not  less  characteristic  that  since  the  Council  of  Trent 
and  Luther's  translation  of  the  Bible,  the  Churches  know  no 
more  of  such  alternatives. 

§  47.  Result  of  the  History  of  the  Canon 

1.  As  the  original  Canon  of  the  New  Testament  grew 
out  of  the  usages  of  the  Church,  and  consisted  of  the  books 
which  had  long  served  in  the  leading  communities  for  edifi- 
cation and  for  settling  questions  of  belief,  and  as  this 
canonisation  of  tradition  was  only  justified,  after  it  was 
already  accomplished,  by  the  assertion  that  none  but 
Apostolic  writings  had  been  canonised,  so  the  second  half  of 
the  history  of  the  Canon  is  entirely  governed  by  the  idea 
here  indicated,  an  idea  which  was  firmly  grasped  as  early  as 
the  time  of  Irenaeus  and  Tertullian.  The  Apostles  signify 
to  the  Church  of  the  New  Covenant  exactly  what  Moses  and 
the  Prophets  signified  to  the  people  of  the  Old  ;  the  writings 
of  the  Apostles  must  stand  on  the  same  level  with  theirs,  as 
authentic  records  of  Divine  Kevelation.  But  naturally  this 
only  applied  to  the  genuine,  uncorrupted  writings.  Augustine 
felt  no  more  strongly  against  the  heretics  who  rejected  the 
Apostolic  writings,  or  portions  of  them,  because  these  were 
not  to  their  liking,  than  against  those  who  could  not  endure 
that  the  hymn  uttered  by  Jesus  (Matt.  xxvi.  30)  or 
the  Epistle  written  by  Paul  to  the  Laodiceans  (according  to 
Col.  iv.  16)  should  no  longer  be  in  existence,  and  supplied 
the  loss  by  their  own  fabrications  :  '  what  is  Apostolic  is 
Canonical,'  was  his  principle,  but  only  what  is  truly  Apostolic. 
Whether  those  writings  which  were  called  Apostolic  really 
possessed  this  quality  was  left  to  the  decision  of  none  but 
the  Apostolic  Church,  the  questioner  herself.  What  the 
Church  had  always  held  to  be  Apostolic  must  be  accepted  as 
such,  and  by  '  the  Church '  the  majority  in  the  Church  was 
meant.  Since  the  effort  after  uniformity  constantly  increased 
from  the  year  200  onwards,  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  and 
the  Apocalypse  had  at  last  to  be  given  their  place  in  the  Canon, 


560     AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP  in. 

in  spite  of  all  objections,  because  the  tradition  of  the  whole 
Greek  Church  supported  the  former,  and  that  of  the  whole 
Latin  Church  the  latter.  The  case  is  different  as  regards 
the  minor  Catholic  Epistles.  They  had  not  held  a  high 
place  of  old  in  any  important  church  or  circle  of  churches  ; 
they  emerge  almost  without  warning  from  obscurity,  and 
raise  the  question  of  their  recognition  by  the  Church  in  spite 
of  deficient  '  tradition.'  This  question  was  answered  variously 
according  as  more  stress  was  laid  on  the  trustworthiness  of 
their  Apostolic  title  or  on  the  ecclesiastical  tradition  supporting 
them ;  at  last  it  was  agreed  to  accept  them  because  they  con- 
tained nothing  which  might  contradict  their  Apostolic  author- 
ship, and  because  they  attached  themselves  very  easily  to  the 
Epistles  already  in  existence,  1.  Peter  and  1.  John;  while  the 
importance  of  these  old  favourites  was  happily  increased  by 
such  a  timely  addition. 

On  the  other  hand,  after  the  year  200,  non-Apostolic 
writings,  however  brilliant  their  recommendation,  could  not 
by  any  manner  of  means  effect  an  entry  into  communities 
which  had  not  an  earlier  acquaintance  with  them.  New 
writings  were  only  received  if  they  came  with  an 
Apostolic  title  ;  hence  the  Catholic  uniformity  of  the  New 
Testament  with  regard  to  writings  like  those  of  Clement, 
Barnabas  and  Hernias  could  only  be  attained  by  abandoning 
these  even  in  their  old  homes.  With  them  were  abandoned 
also  a  number  of  works  with  an  Apostolic  title,  such  as  the 
*  Teaching  of  the  Apostles,'  the  Preaching  and  the  Apoca- 
lypse of  Peter,  and  the  Acts  of  Paul,  because  the  general  sense 
of  the  Church  discovered  in  them  a  closer  relationship  with  un- 
doubted heretical  forgeries  than  with  the  Apostolic  writings  of 
the  Canon,  and  because,  on  the  whole,  they  had  no  sufficient 
points  of  connection  with  the  Canon.  Who  knows  whether 
the  Apocalypse  of  Peter  would  not  at  last  have  been  received 
in  the  West,  as  was  the  Epistle  of  Paul  to  the  Hebrews,  if, 
at  the  decisive  moment,  the  Apocalypse  of  John  had  not 
been  rejected  in  the  Greek  Church,  thus  making  the  Apo- 
calypse of  Peter  untenable  ?  Accident  of  this  land  influenced 
the  decision ;  but  from  the  third  century  onwards  the  Church, 
with  constantly  increasing  energy,  consciously  refused  to 


§47.]  RESULT   OF   T1IK    HISTORY   OF   THE    CANON  561 

admit  anything  within  the  Canon  except  the  whole  body  of 
the  attested  writings  of  the  Apostles.1  Those  who  ascribed 
the  Apocalypse  to  a  holy  and  inspired  man  distinct  from 
the  Apostle,  or  2.  and  3.  John  to  an  otherwise  unknown 
Presbyter,  and  yet  would  retain  them  in  the  Canon,  stand 
entirely  alone.  The  required  attestation  is  now  found,  art- 
lessly enough,  in  the  fact  that  the  Church  accepted  them 
as  Apostolic ;  as  Augustine  explained  to  the  Manichaeans, 
4 1  must  give  credence  to  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  if  I  do  to 
the  Gospels,  for  both  writings  are  recommended  to  me  equally 
by  the  Catholic  authority.' 

Augustine  could  not  have  entertained  the  theory  of  a 
modern  Catholic  theologian,  Cornely — who  indeed  has  a  fore- 
runner in  Gregory  the  Great, — viz.  that  if  Hebrews  were 
proved  to  proceed,  not  from  Paul,  but  from  one  of  his  disciples 
or  some  other  Apostolic  person,  its  canonicity  would  not  suffer, 
inasmuch  as  this  depended,  not  on  its  Apostolic  origin,  but 
on  its  inspiration  as  recognised  by  the  Church ;  nor  that 
of  another  Catholic,  Martin,  according  to  which  certain 
portions  of  the  Vulgate  which  do  not  belong  to  the  original 
text  are  quasi-canonical,  the  authority  of  the  Church  supply- 
ing their  defect  and  lending  them  a  force  which  they  had  not 
in  themselves.  For  Augustine,  Apostolicity  is  the  foundation 
upon  which  rest  inspiration  and  canonicity,  i.e.  ecclesiastical 
recognition  ;  in  his  eyes,  to  accept  ecclesiastical  recognition  as  a 
substitute  for  inspiration  would  be  a  sheer  inversion  of  things. 
These  theories,  indeed,  are  but  a  return,  by  no  means  artless, 
to  the  first  stage  in  the  formation  of  the  Canon,  in  which 

1  The  Christians  whom  Jerome  attacks  in  his  Commentary  on  Philemon 
might  be  considered  an  exception  ;  they  rejected  this  Epistle  on  account  of  its 
unimportant  contents,  because  it  did  not  contain  teaching,  but  was  only  a 
letter  of  recommendation.  The  Holy  Ghost,  they  said,  had  dwelt  uninter- 
ruptedly in  no  man  but  Christ.  But  I  cannot  believe  that  these  unknown 
Christians  are  really  meant  for  the  Syrian  Church,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that 
Chrysostom  and  Theodore  also  assert  the  real  value  of  this  Epistle,  with  all 
the  appearance  of  conducting  a  set  argument  in  its  defence.  The  question  is 
one  of  points  of  pedantic  theory,  the  importance  of  which  Jerome  exaggerates  in 
order  to  make  corresponding  display  of  his  zeal  in  defence  ;  the  learned  writer 
himself  has  to  acknowledge  that «  all  the  Churclies  in  the  whole  world  have  re- 
ceived the  Epistle,'  and  the  dogma  of  the  uninterrupted  inspiration  of  the 
Apostles  is  not  seriously  in  danger. 

O  O 


562     AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  in. 

the  sympathy  of  the  communities,  not  a  theory  of  inspiration 
or  any  learned  information  concerning  the  author,  lent  the 
sacred  books  their  authority.  Luther's  and  Zwingli's  retui 
to  the  subjectivism  of  the  earliest  Church,  while  betrayii 
another  spirit,  is  in  no  cruder  opposition  to  the  law  of  history. 
2.  The  technical  term  for  what  is  recommended  by  this 
Catholic  authority  is  Canonical ;  for  that  which  it  rejects 
on  solicitation,  Apocryphal.  The  original  meaning  of  the 
word  *  Canon '  (canonical,  canonise)  in  this  technical  appli- 
cation is  not  perfectly  clear  ;  the  Latins  translate  it  sometimes 
by  regula,  sometimes  by  nutnerus.  Both  these  meanings  are 
attested  by  other  evidence  as  well ;  KCLVU>V  originally  meant 
standard,  rule,  and  therefore  may  also  signify  something 
established  by  absolute  rule,  something  fixed  (e.g.  in  the  State, 
TOV  fcavova  7r\rjpovv  =  to  pay  the  fixed  tax-assessment),  such  as 
a  catalogue,1  an  index.  Now,  as  in  the  oldest  ecclesiastical 
literature  the  word  xavajv,  with  additions  such  as  *  of  the  faith, 
of  the  truth,'  represents  the  ideal  conception  of  the  Divine 
things  of  the  Church — its  new  law,  whether  written  or  un- 
written— so,  on  the  other  hand,  might  theology,  when  it 
began  to  speak  of  a  Canon  of  Divine  writings,  of  admittance 
into  this  Canon  and  the  like,  have  understood  by  it  the  fixed 
and  established  list  /car'  s^o-^v — that  of  the  Holy  Scriptures. 
Only  in  this  sense  do  we  speak  of  a  Canon  of  Muratori,  and 
the  same  sense  meets  us  again  when  Amphilochius 2  sets 
up  his  catalogue  of  the  Biblical  Books  as  an  entirely  infallible 
Canon  of  the  inspired  writings  ;  or  when  Augustine  speaks 
of  the  Canon  of  Holy  Scriptures  which  requires  definite 
limitation :  '  Quern  definitum  esse  oportebat.'  Nevertheless,  i 
the  ecclesiastical  use  of  the  word  'Canon,'  as  =  the  Old  and  Ne 
Testaments,  the  idea  of  the  subject-matter  absolutely  prevails 
over  that  of  the  form  ;  with  the  word  '  Canon,'  a  judgment 
passed  upon  the  contents  of  certain  Scriptures  :  they  are  th 
which  the  Church  holds  to  be  incorruptible  records  of  the 
Law  of  God.  The  Canon  is  the  pattern  according  to  which 
everything  in  the  Church  is  judged  ;  Canonisation  signifies 

1  E.g.  the    Canons    of    Eusebius   (below,    §    50,    5),  and  Socrates,  Hint. 
Eccl  i.  19. 

2  §  43,  1. 


§  47.]  RESULT    OF   THE    HISTORY    OF   THE    CANON  563 

recognition  as  an  integral  part  of  this  pattern.  In  using  the 
word  'canonical'  the  Christian  of  about  the  year  200  had 
exactly  the  same  feeling  as  if  he  had  said  :  Divine,  holy,  in- 
fallible, an  absolute  standard.  Augustine  used  the  terms 
'  Canon  '  and  '  authority  '  interchangeably,  and  in  some  places 
used  the  two  together.  He  considered  *  Canonical '  Epistles 
as  synonymous  with  '  inspired ' ;  everywhere  alike  '  Canonical ' 
is  the  absolutely  binding,  as  opposed  to  the  neutral  and  the  bad 
—the  writings  lacking  authority.  The  epithet  '  Canonical '  as 
applied  to  books  is  exchanged  without  any  alteration  of  sense 
with  *  testamental '  (sv^idd^Kos  and  sv&idOsro!?)  or  '  included  ' 
(fytcpiro*)  or  even  '  ecclesiastical '  (this  particularly  with  the 
Latins).  It  is  interesting  to  note  that  instead  of 
or  even  beside  it,  the  Greeks  often  put 
'  belonging  to  the  Church,'  i.e.  recognised  by  the  whole  Church. 
At  the  opposite  pole  to  these  stand  the  '  writings  of  individuals.' l 
The  books  in  which  the  Church  recognises  her  own  flesh  and 
blood  are  intended  for  publicity,  they  have  to  be  brought  for- 
ward regularly  at  every  vital  act  of  the  Church  ;  so  that  even 
the  Muratorianum  speaks  of  the  '  Se  publicare  in  ecclesia 
populo,'  and  later  writers  often  of  the  Srt/jLoo-isvso-Oai  of  the 
sacred  books,  which  is  at  last  no  longer  distinguishable  from 
the  '  reading  aloud  to  the  congregations.' 

The  most  comprehensive  term  for  the  books  which  were 
rejected,  in  spite  of  apparent  claims  to  the  highest  rank,  is 
the  Apocrypha.  In  the  mouth  of  the  Gnostics  it  is  a  term  of 
esteem  ;  their  secret  traditions,  as  contrasted  with  the  trivial, 
were  the  precious  possessions  of  the  Elect.  The  Church  had 
every  reason  to  keep  the  secret  literature  of  the  Gnostics  at  a 
distance ;  she  was  as  proud  of  her  published  as  they  were  of 
their  secret  records  ;  all  the  '  secret  writings  '  which  had  not 
attained  publicity  in  the  churches  were  soon  regarded  with 
mistrust.  But  in  itself  there  is  as  yet  no  reproach  attaching 
to  the  term — it  merely  signifies  exclusion  from  public  reading 
in  the  churches.  It  was  not  until  a  prohibition  had  been  passed 
against  a  number  of  writings  presumed  to  be  Apostolic,  on  the 
ground  that  they  were  spurious — thus  making  the  '  spurious  ' 

1  Canon  Laodic.  59,  i5tam/coi  tJ/aA/ioi,  and  later  the  more  general  a.Ka.v6vi<na 

o  o  2 


564      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  in. 

a  majority  among  the  '  secret '  or  '  separated  '  writings — that 
these  ideas  passed  into  one  another,  and  Apocryphal  came  to 
mean  falsely  ascribed,  lying,  dangerous.  Thus  even  the  most 
innocent  books,  which  had  never  laid  claim  to  Apostolic  author- 
ship, but  had  merely  been  stripped  of  their  earlier  veneration, 
were  now  flung  aside  among  the  Apocrypha ;  and  from  the  fourth 
century  onwards  the  Church  considered  it  her  duty  to  hinder 
the  reading  of  the  Apocrypha,  and  to  this  end  to  draw  up 
lists  of  the  Apocryphal  books.  The  most  famous  of  these 
lists  is  the  '  Decretum  de  recipiendis  et  non  recipiendis  Libris,' l 
which  is  ascribed  to  the  Popes  Damasus,2  Gelasius,3  and 
Hormisdas,4  and  exists  in  several  recensions.  This  is  the 
original  form — disfigured  by  many  gross  errors — of  an  '  Index 
Librorum  prohibitorum,'  for  the  authors  did  not  confine 
themselves  to  Biblical  and  pseudo-Biblical  books  either  in 
their  lists  of  acceptable  or  prohibited  writings.  Apocryphal, 
however,  remained  the  general  title  given  to  everything 
which  was  rejected,  and  soon  meant  simply  heretical.  The 
use  of  the  word  in  the  Lutheran  Church,  which  describes 
Apocryphal  books  as  those  '  which  do  not  belong  to  the 
Holy  Scriptures,  but  which  are  useful  and  good  to  read,'  is 
connected  with  its  use  in  the  early  Church  ;  unfortunately, 
in  ecclesiastical  language  all  the  different  meanings  of  the 
word  have  been  retained  :  (1)  secretly  propagated  (according 
to  Priscillian),  (2)  not  suitable  for  public  reading  in  the 
church,  (3)  spurious  (not  by  the  reputed  authors,  or  no 
entirely  by  them),  and  (4s)  heretical. 

The  differences  in  the  form  of  quotation  from  the  Old  an 
New  Testaments  which  were  noticed  as  still  existing  about 
the  year  200,  disappeared  soon  after,  owing  to  the  feeling  of 
unity  between  the  Old  and  the  New.  The  '  New  Testament ' 
formed  with  the  Old  an  inseparable  whole,  united  with  it  under 
the  name  of  the  Scripture,  or  the  Divine  Scripture,  or  more 
rarely  in  the  plural.  So  much  has  ypafoj.  Scripture,  become 
the  name  of  the  Bible,  that  Old  or  New  Testament  quotations  are 
introduced  as  ypa(f>L/cal  paprvplat,  Scriptural  testimony.  Also 
the  Old  and  New  Scriptures  are  spoken  of  in  the  same  sense  as 


: 


1  A  text  in  Prouschen  ;  vid.  sup.  p.  459. 
-  t384.  '  f496.  "    *  t523. 


§47.]  RESULT    OF    T1IK    HlsTOllV    OF    THK    CANON  565 

the  Old  and  New  Testaments,  and  in  the  innumerable  instances 
to  be  found  in  Christian|literature  after  375,  in  which  the  sub- 
stantive is  omitted  (only  ?;  7ra\at,d — tj  Kaivrf)  it  is  impos- 
sible to  say  whether  we  are  to  understand  '  Scripture  '  or 
*  Covenant.'  The  term  *  books  '  (Divine,  Ancient,  and  so  forth) 
appears  much  more  seldom  among  both  Greeks  and  Latins. 
The  word  '  biblia  '  ('  sacra  ')  in  the  singular,  from  which  the 
word  *  Bible '  is  derived,  originated  in  the  later  Middle  Ages. 

3.  Every  trace  of  growth — nay,  of  being  the  product 
of  growth — appears  to  have  been  removed  from  the  New 
Testament  for  centuries  ;  even  as  early  as  the  year  500  such 
traces  are  only  to  be  recognised  by  the  keenest  scrutiny : 
externally,  all  appendages  appear  utterly  rejected ;  internally, 
the  various  distinctions  of  class  and  degree  are  one  and  all 
swept  away.  But  this  latter  is  in  reality  an  illusion.  It  has 
never  been  possible  in  practice  to  give  to  all  the  New  Testa- 
ment Books  the  same  position.  Chrysostom,  the  very  man 
who  feels  obliged  to  put  in  a  good  word  for  the  Epistle  to 
Philemon,  lets  us  see  how  lightly  the  Acts  were  often  valued, 
and  that  to  some  readers  they  were  almost  unknown.  A 
Western  confuter  of  heresy,  who  is  indignant  because 
the  heretics  reject  several  of  the  Gospels  and  the  Pauline 
Epistles,  and  also  the  Apocalypse,  does  not  even  mention 
their  small  regard  for  the  Catholic  Epistles.  The  Church — I 
do  not  speak  of  individual  enthusiasts — has  never  considered 
the  Apocalypse  to  be  as  important  as  the  Epistle  to  the 
Eoinans,  nor  Mark  as  important  as  Matthew,  nor  the 
Catholic  Epistles  as  the  Pauline.  Wherever  we  look, 
whether  to  their  employment  in  dogmatic  discussions,  to 
their  use  in  the  Liturgy,  or  to  the  claims  made  on  them  for 
family  edification,  the  difference  between  the  individual 
documents,  judged  with  particular  reference  to  their  bulk, 
has  always  been  enormous.  It  is  astonishing  how  far,  on 
the  whole,  the  Church  has  judged  aright :  the  Gospels,  which 
she  completed  first,  are  read  a  thousand  times  more  often 
than  the  writings  of  the  Apostles  ;  and  Matthew,  which  was 
the  first  to  be  universally  received,  is  the  most  important  book 
that  exists.  Those  documents  which  were  added  last — the 
Antilegomena  of  Eusebius — and  which  were  only  introduced  on 


566      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT    [CHAP.  in. 

the  hesitating  reflection  of  later  generations,  are  those  which 
have  least  to  offer  to  the  Christian  world.  The  healthy  manner 
in  which  the  new  book  was  allowed  to  grow  up  is  one  of  the 
main  reasons  why,  in  defiance  of  the  Church's  equalising 
dogma  of  inspiration,  religious  energy  dared  again  and  again 
to  exercise  choice  within  the  Canon,  and  to  distinguish  the 
'essential  books'  from  straw  and  stubble— why  in  fact 
Christianity,  although  a  book-religion  from  the  first,  has 
nevertheless  remained  '  Life.'  The  incontestable  facts  of 
the  history  of  the  New  Testament  Canon  are  themselves 
the  safeguard  against  all  danger  lest  this  Canon  might 
become — and  remain — an  oppressive  yoke  instead  of  a  support. 


PART  III 

A   HISTORY  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT  TEXT 

CHAPTEK  I 

§  48.  The  Original  Manuscripts 

[Cf.  O.  von  Gebhardt's  article  entitled  'Bibeltext  des  N.  T.'s  T 
in  the  '  Protestantische  Eeal-Encyclopiidie  '  (1897),  vol.  ii.  pp.  728- 
773.  Also  E.  Nestle,  '  Einfiihrung  in  das  griechische  N.  T." 
(1899) ;  Scrivener,  '  A  plain  Introduction  to  the  Criticism  of  the 
New  Testament,'  in  2  vols.  (1894),  and  C.  E.  Gregory,  '  Textkritik 
des  N.  T.'s/  vol  i.  (1900).  In  this  section  we  must  borrow 
largely  from  that  branch  of  philological  science  known  as  palaeo- 
graphy. A  French  scholar  named  B.  de  Montfaucon,  a  Benedictine 
of  the  Congregation  of  St.  Maur,1  was  really  the  creator  of  this 
science  with  his  '  Palaeographia  Graeca,'  pub.  in  1708  and  the  fol- 
lowing year.  Palaeographical  studies  have  now  flourished  for 
several  decades,  and  the  material  has  thus  been  enormously  in- 
creased, but  even  so  Montfaucon's  work  is  not  yet  out  of  date. 
S.  Gardthausen  gives  a  comprehensive  presentation  of  the  sub- 
ject in  his  '  Griechische  Palaographie  '  (Leipzig,  1879).  Consult 
also  T.  Birt :  '  Das  antike  Buchwesen  in  seinem  Verhaltnis  zur 
Literatur  '  (Berlin,  1882) ;  E.  Ehode  in  the  '  Gottingische  gelehrte 
Anzeigen  '  for  1882,  pp.  1537-63,  and  Dziatzko's  article  on  '  Das 
Buch '  in  the  '  Eeal-Encyclopadie  der  classischen  Altertums- 
wissenschaft/  published  in  Pauly-Wissowa,  vol.  iii.  pp.  939-971.] 

1.  The  original  documents2  from  the  hands  of  the  New 
Testament  authors  themselves  were  all  lost  at  a  very  early 
date.  It  is  true  that  an  unknown  chronicler,  writing  in  the 
fourth  century  at  earliest,  informs  us  that  the  original  MS. 

1   Died  in  1741. 


568       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO    THE    NEW   TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

of  John  was  preserved  at  Ephesus  ;  at  Prague  and  Venice  it 
was  claimed  until  late  in  the  eighteenth  century  that  the 
original  of  Mark's  Gospel  was  preserved  at  both  those  places — 
the  fact  that  it  was  in  Latin  being  overlooked — and  A.  Scholz, 
in  his  '  Biblischkritische  Keise '  (1823)  tells  of  a  supposed 
autographon  of  Matthew  in  Laodicea.  These  are  mere  idle 
inventions,  for  if  the  spokesmen  of  the  Church  could  have 
brought  forward  any  original  Apostolic  manuscript  in  their 
struggle  against  heresy,  especially  against  the  '  falsifier ' 
Marcion,  they  might  have  spared  themselves  much  trouble  and 
long  dispute  as  to  what  was  genuine  and  what  was  not.  When 
Tertullian  appeals  to  the  authentic  writings  of  the  Apostles  as 
they  were  still  read  out  in  the  churches  of  Corinth,  Kome  and 
Ephesus,1  he  probably  means  the  unaltered  Text  as  opposed 
to  that  *  emendated '  by  the  Gnostics,  or  else  we  should 
perhaps  rate  his  testimony  in  favour  of  those  writings  as  a 
mere  rhetorical  phrase,  like  his  '  thrones  of  the  Apostles.'  But 
it  is  always  possible  to  obtain  a  clear  idea  of  the  nature  of  those 
original  manuscripts  through  our  knowledge  of  what  was  the 
appearance  of  books  and  letters  of  that  time,  for  the  New 
Testament  authors  would  naturally  have  conformed  to  t 
usage  of  their  age  and  their  surroundings  in  all  the  liter  a 
apparatus  they  employed.2 

2.  A  wooden  tablet  smeared  with  wax,  such  as  the  dumb 
priest  Zacharias  had  brought  to  him  in  order  to  write  the  name 
'  John  '  in  the  soft  material  for  the  son  of  his  old  age,3  was  no 
sufficient  for  the  purposes  of  a  serious  writer ;  for  books  as  w 
as  for  letters  of  a  certain  length,  an  artificial  product  was  u 
which  was  prepared  from  the  Egyptian  papyrus  shrub  and  re- 
sembled our  paper,  which  derives  its  name  from  it.  The 
Cyperus  papyrus  (Trcnrvpos)  once  grew  in  great  quantities  in 
the  Delta  of  the  Nile,  as  well  as  in  certain  places  in  Syria  and 
Palestine,  and  even  in  Sicily.  Its  pith  (/3v/3\os)  was  cut  into  fine 
strips,  and  after  skilful  preparation  formed  a  material  suitable 
for  the  purposes  of  writing.4  The  further  requirements  for 
writing  were  :  (1)  a  pen,  i.e.  the  specially  prepared  stalk 

1  De  Praescriptione  Haereticorum,  ch.  xxxvi. 

2  See  Hilary  :  '  Communis  apostolo  elementorum  atquc  apicum  forma  est.' 

3  Luke  i.  63.  4  6  XC£OTTJS,  2.  John  3  2. 


ew 

I 


$48.]  T1IM    OI1KMNA1,    MAM'.SCKHTS  569 

a  reed  (/cdXa/nos),1  which  had  to  be  cut  into  shape  almost  as 
in  the  case  of  our  ancient  goose-quill  (so  that  a  penknife  *  was 
also  indispensable  to  the  writer),  and  which  was  likewise  chiefly 
to  be  found  in  Egypt ;  and  (2)  some  ink  (TO  /xeXai/),3  which  was 
introduced  into  the  cane  by  means  of  a  piece  of  wool,  and  was 
prepared  from  soot,  vitriol,  and  similar  substances.  The  indi- 
vidual papyrus  leaves  (a-e\iSs$  or  columns  ')  were  of  different 
sizes  according  to  the  needs  and  wishes  of  those  who  bought 
them  ;  their  average  size,  however,  might  be  laid  down  as  about 
one  hand-breadth  in  width  and  not  quite  twice  as  much  in  length. 
A  single  leaf  of  this  kind  was  quite  sufficient  for  accounts, 
contracts  and  short  notes,  such  as  have  been  preserved  to  us 
in  very  large  numbers,  but  for  compositions  of  greater  length 
several  of  them  had  to  be  fastened  together.  This  was  done 
from  left  to  right,  the  left  edge  of  the  second  leaf  being  glued 
to  the  right  edge  of  the  first,  and  so  on.  Sheets  made  in  this 
manner,  which  were  often  very  long,  were  only  written  upon 
on  the  upper  side.  Those  written  upon  on  both  sides  (ra 
spTTpocrOev  KOL  ra  OTTICTW  jsypafji/jis^a  *)  belong,  like  many  extra- 
ordinary things,  to  the  visionary  machinery  of  Ezekiel  and  the 
Apocalypse.  A  space  of  one  finger-breadth  at  least  must 
have  been  left  blank  at  the  edge  of  each  leaf,  if  only  to  provide 
means  for  sticking  them  together,  but  even  apart  from  this 
consideration  a  margin  would  have  been  made  on  aesthetic 
grounds  to  right  and  left,  as  well  as  above  and  below.  Short 
letters  were  rolled  firmly  together,  a  thread  fastened  round 
them  to  which  the  seal  could  be  conveniently  attached,  and 
the  address  written  on  the  outside.6  But  with  writings  of 
greater  length,  or  those  intended  for  frequent  perusal  (IBi(3\oi 
or  j3ift\la),  a  cylindrical  stick  was  fastened  to  the  edge  of  the 
last  leaf,  with  its  ends  sticking  out  above  and  below,  and  the 
upper  end,  at  any  rate,  usually  adorned  with  a  knob.  Several 
leaves  together  were  then  rolled  round  this  stick  in  such  a 
manner  that  the  written  part  was  always  inside,  that  of  the 
last  leaf  lying  directly  against  the  stick,  while  the  outer 

1  3.  John  13.  2  rb  £vpbv  rov  7po^oT6cws,  Jer.  xxxvi.  23. 

3  2.  Cor.  iii.  3.  4  Jer.  ibid. 

5  Ezek.  ii.  10,  and  possibly  Rev.  v.  1. 
*  E.g.,  'ATroAAwj/ioj  or  T£  irarpl 


570       AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

cover  was  formed  by  the  first  leaf,  though  only  its  unwritten 
side  was  exposed  to  the  dust. 

The  whole  was  cylindrical  in  shape,  and,  to  prevent  it 
from  unrolling,  straps  were  fastened  to  the  outside  leaf, 
knotted  together,  and  if  necessary,  also  sealed.  The  reader 
would  then  proceed  first  to  untie  the  straps,  and  then  to 
unroll  one  leaf  after  the  other,  from  right  to  left,  holding  the 
roller  in  his  right  hand ;  another  stick  would  usually  be 
attached  to  the  first  leaf,  round  which  the  roll  would  gradually 
wind  itself  after  being  read — this  time  with  the  writing  out- 
side ;  and  thus  the  reader  would  hold  a  roll  in  each  hand,  one 
containing  the  part  of  the  book  already  done  with,  the  other 
that  still  unfinished,  and  between  the  two,  straight  before  his 
eyes,  the  leaf  with  which  he  was  busy  at  the  moment. 
Naturally,  some  rolls  were  very  small  and  some  gigantic,  and 
it  is  probably  the  idea  of  a  huge  roll  of  this  kind  that  under- 
lies ver.  xviii.  5  of  the  Apocalypse.  A  convenient  medium  size 
seems,  however,  to  have  become  usual  long  before  the  time 
of  Christ,  through  the  influence  of  Alexandrian  scholars  and 
booksellers.  Papyrus  is  not  a  particularly  durable  material, 
and  yet  not  only  have  countless  little  notes,  but  even  a  few 
genuine  rolls,  been  preserved  down  to  our  own  time  under  the 
ashes  of  Herculaneum  and  in  the  sand  of  Egypt.  In  the 
New  Testament  the  book-roll  (d\^r6v=volnmen}  is  not 
directly  mentioned,  but  ver.  vii.  14  of  the  Apocalypse  shows 
that  books  were  thought  of  as  rolls,  and  the  K£$a\\s  /3t/3XiW 
quoted  by  the  author  of  Hebrews  L  from  Psalm  xl.2  can  only 
be  translated  by  « the  roll  of  the  book  ' ;  it  means  properly 
'  the  little  head  of  the  book,'  a  designation  for  the  knob  by 
which  the  roll  was  drawn  out  of  its  cover  and  held  while 
being  read,  and  then  became,  by  a  natural  synecdoche,  the 
name  for  the  roll  itself. 

Papyrus  was  not  the  only  writing-material  known  in  the 
time  of  the  Apostles.  The  Jews  had  Thora- rolls  of  leather 
(1^6 spa),  and  held  obstinately  to  the  custom  of  using  them  long 
after  rolls  had  been  given  up  by  every  other  nation.  But  in  the 
Greek  world,  too,  parchment  began  to  rival  papyrus  as  early  as 
the  second  century  before  Christ.  Parchment  is  a  substance 

1  Verse  x.  7.  •  Verse  7,  and  see  also  Ezekiel  ii.  i>. 


§48.]  THE   ORIGINAL    MANUSCRIPTS  571 

obtained  by  tanning  and  otherwise  skilfully  preparing  the 
hides  of  animals— those  of  asses  or  antelopes  yielding  the 
best  quality — and  many  conclude  from  its  name,  TrspYaprjvr), 
that  it  was  invented  by  the  inhabitants  of  Pergamus,  though, 
indeed,  a  much  older  and  more  commonly  used  word  for  it 
was  /jbe^lBpava,  borrowed  from  the  Latin.  But  parchment  was 
more  costly  than  papyrus,  and  the  New  Testament  writers 
would  scarcely  have  used  it  for  their  works.  If  indeed,  as  we 
are  told  in  2.  Timothy  iv.  13,  Paul  possessed  certain  psuPpdvai 
among  the  books  left  behind  at  Troas,  these  parchments  would 
certainly  not  have  been  original  copies  of  the  New  Testament 
writings,  still  less  his  own  notebooks  or  memoranda,  but 
were  most  probably  copies  of  the  sacred  books  of  the  Old 
Testament,  which  the  Jew  would  certainly  have  procured  in  a 
more  costly  form. 

3.  It  is  scarcely  probable  that  the  Uncial ]  handwriting 
which  we  find  in  ancient  inscriptions  and  in  the  earliest  parch- 
ment codices  of  the  fourth  century,  was  employed  in  the 
autographa  of  the  New  Testament.  Even  though  their 
authors  may  not  have  been  practised  shorthand  writers 
(ra^vypd(f)ot,  notarii),  they  would  yet  have  had  no  cause  to 
employ  an  ecriture  de  luxe  for  their  modest  records. 
Moreover,  the  ordinary  handwriting  of  those  days  was 
cursive,  a  form  in  which  the  letters  were  joined  together  and 
abbreviations  were  plentifully  used,  so  that  both  time  and 
paper  were  saved.  This  style  of  handwriting  was  certainly 
not  the  most  convenient  for  the  reader,  for  it  might  easily 
give  rise  to  misunderstandings,  if,  say,  an  abbreviation  were 
wrongly  interpreted  ;  but  so  long  as  the  Uncial  form,  innocent 
as  it  was  of  any  distinction  between  small  and  capital  letters, 
of  punctuation,  or  of  any  signs  whatever,  clung  to  the  scriptio 
continua,  i.e.  the  handwriting  without  any  intervals  between 
the  words,  fluent  reading  was  there  too  an  art  that  required 
some  learning.  Nor  would  even  Luke  have  had  calligraphers 
at  his  disposal  who  would  undertake  to  clear  and  simplify 
all  his  involved  constructions,  or  even  those  professional 
correctors  who  prided  themselves  on  polishing  the  manuscripts 
committed  to  them  of  all  their  mistakes. 

1  From  uncia  =  an  inch,  referring  to  the  original  size  of  the  letter. 


572       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT      [CHAP.  i. 

Most  of  the  New  Testament  Books  were  probably  written 
down  by  their  authors  themselves;  it  was  only  Paul  who 
preferred  to  dictate  his  epistles,  and  he  always  made  use  of 
some  Christian  from  among  his  immediate  followers  as  his 
scribe,1  usually  adding  a  word  of  greeting  with  his  own  hand 
at  the  end.2  Galatians  is  the  only  exception  to  this  rule — for 
no  one  at  the  moment  of  taking  the  pen  from  his  secretary 
would  say,  as  Paul  does  at  the  end  of  this  epistle,3  '  See  with 
how  large  letters  I  have  written  unto  you  with  mine  own 
hand.'  But  the  words  are  important  as  showing  why  Paul 
preferred  to  leave  the  business  of  writing  to  others.  It  was 
an  effort  to  him ;  his  characters  had  something  crabbed  and 
uncouth  about  them.  As  a  rule,  of  course,  the  Apostle's 
letters  carried  addresses,  but  certainly  not  the  present 
superscriptions  (e.g.  irpbs  QsaaaKovLKSis  Trpcorr)),  which  even 
Tertullian  had  enough  insight  to  perceive  were  nothing  but  the 
additions  of  later  collectors ;  the  Apostle  himself  would  probably 
not  have  troubled  himself  any  more  about  the  formulation  of 
the  address  than  about  the  proper  fastening  of  the  letter-roll. 

It  is  not  likely  that  the  length  of  the  New  Testament 
writings  was  dependent  on  the  writing-materials  available. 
In  the  case  of  letters  it  would  indeed  seem  not  unnatural  that 
the  writer  should  regulate  himself  according  to  the  size  of 
the  papyrus-roll  used  ;  and  yet  among  the  Epistles  of  Paul 
only  Philippians  and  Colossians  are  alike  in  bulk,  and  nowhere 
is  there  any  trace  of  an  unintentional  breaking-off.  It  is 
certainly  not  an  accidental  coincidence  that  the  Book  of  Acts 
is  exactly  as  long  as  the  Gospel  of  Luke,  the  Trpwros  \dyos 
of  Acts  i.  1 ;  but  it  was  undoubtedly  the  intention  of  the 
author  to  make  the  two  halves  of  his  work  symmetrical ;  he 
was  not  driven  to  do  so  by  the  exigencies  of  space,  as  afforded 
by  machine-made  rolls,  and  even  if  the  roll  were  at  any  time 
insufficient,  it  would  have  been  quite  easy  to  attach  a  few 
more  papyrus  leaves  to  or  between  the  rest.  The  author's 
dependence  on  his  writing-material  would  be  far  more 
comprehensible  at  a  time  when  parchment  was  in  the 
ascendant  than  when  he  used  nothing  but  papyrus,  which 
was  always  cheap  and  easy  to  obtain. 

1  Horn.  xvi.  22.         2  1  Cor.  xvi.  21  ;  2  Thess.  iii.  17  fol.  :(  vi.  11. 


573 


CHAPTER   II 

THE    MULTIPLICATION    OF    THE    TEXTS    DOWN    TO    THE    TIME 
OF    THE    INVENTION    OF    PRINTING 

§  49.  The  actual  Increase 

1.  WRITINGS  like  the  Apocalypse  and  the  Gospels,  which  were 
intended  from  the  first  for  a  considerable  public,  were 
circulated  immediately  after  their  composition  in  numerous 
copies ;  which,  even  supposing  that  the  author  had  bestowed 
a  certain  amount  of  supervision  upon  them,  could  not  all 
have  been  exactly  alike.  Still  less  could  this  be  expected 
of  those  copies  which  were  made  in  distant  parts  from 
scattered  examples  of  the  'first  edition.'  Very  early,  too, 
copies  (aTroypa^a,  avriypa^a)  were  made  of  letters  of  the 
Apostles  in  other  communities  than  those  for  which  they  had 
originally  been  solely  intended.  As  early  as  the  year  100  we 
hear  that  the  Roman  Christians  were  reading  1.  Corinthians, 
and  the  author  of  1.  Peter  certainly  possessed  several  of 
Paul's  Epistles.  The  fact  that  the  original  documents  were 
soon  lost  is  partly  explained  by  the  fragile  nature  of 
papyrus,  but  it  also  shows  that  the  very  early  Church  had 
not  the  slightest  inclination  towards  the  worship  of  relics, 
and  proves  beyond  dispute  that  she  did  not  look  upon  these 
documents  as  in  any  special  degree  sacred,  i.e.  Canonical. 
They  disappeared  just  as  other  fragments  of  early  Christian 
literature  vanished  after  a  few  decades.  But  the  number  of 
copies  of  these  first  MSS.  increased  in  almost  the  same 
proportion  as  the  number  of  Christians,  particularly  after 
these  books  began  to  enjoy  Canonical  dignity,  and  by  the 
year  200,  or  thereabouts,  we  may  suppose  that  all  the  larger 
communities  of  the  Roman  Empire  possessed  at  least  one 


574      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

copy  of  the  New  Testament  Books.  This  propagation  and 
multiplication  of  the  texts  was  much  increased  after  the 
fourth  century,  partly  because,  owing  to  the  favour  of  the 
Emperors,  countless  new  communities  arose,  extending  even 
into  the  remotest  villages,  and  partly  because  the  monasteries 
not  only  needed  a  number  of  copies  for  themselves,  but  made 
a  labour  of  love  of  the  preparation  of  new  MSS.,  believing 
it  to  be  a  work  pleasing  to  God.  Nevertheless,  we  must 
beware  of  accepting  exaggerated  estimates  of  the  number 
of  New  Testament  manuscripts  existing  and  circulating  at 
the  same  time ;  before  the  Keformation  the  idea  that  it  was 
the  daily  duty  of  every  Christian  to  read  his  Bible  did  not 
exist,  and  Birt's  assertion  that  '  the  Bible  must  have  been 
obtainable  at  a  low  price,  since  it  was  the  indispensable 
possession  of  every  member  of  a  community,  even  of  the 
very  poorest,'  is  an  enormous  exaggeration.  It  was  the 
exception  for  individual  laymen  to  possess  the  Books  of  the 
Bible,  and  even  the  clergy  only  possessed  them  as  their 
private  property  in  very  few  cases.  Naturally,  however,  each 
community  would  have  been  anxious  to  obtain  complete 
copies,  at  any  rate  of  the  New  Testament,  for  the  use  of  its 
church,  but  nowhere  and  at  no  time  was  this  desire  fulfilled 
in  the  case  of  every  little  village  church.  A  complete 
'  bibliotheca  sacra '  was  only  to  be  found  in  those  places 
where  scholarly  activity  and  ecclesiastical  interest  met,  and  in 
the  language  of  the  Church  '  bibliotheca '  came  to  be  understood 
as  the  whole  body  of  the  '  Scriptures,'  together  with  the 
traditional  apparatus  of  commentaries  and  introductions. 
Nevertheless,  no  book  in  all  the  world's  literature  can  approach 
the  New  Testament  in  the  number  of  copies,  both  of  the 
original  text  and  of  all  manner  of  translations,  which  have 
been  made  of  it. 

2.  But  even  after  the  New  Testament  was  completed,  all 
its  parts  were  by  no  means  propagated  in  equal  quantities. 
The  four  Gospels  on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other  the 
fourteen  Pauline  Epistles,  are  those  which  hang  together 
most  firmly,  nor  is  it  at  all  usual  for  the  Catholic  Epistles- 
wherever  their  number  is  known  and  fixed — to  appear  singly ; 
but  the  Acts  and  more  especially  the  Apocalypse  often  form 


§49.]  TIIK    ACTTAL    INCIJKASK  575 

•complete  volumes  by  themselves,  or,  if  not,  they  are  bound 
up  with  the  Pauline  or  the  Catholic  Epistles.  The  Apocalypse 
has  even  been  met  with  in  a  volume  of  Patristic  Tracts. 
But  separate  versions  of  the  complete  New  Testament,  like 
those  we  possess  in  countless  printed  editions,  are  not  to  be 
found  in  manuscript ;  the  parchment  codices  which  embrace 
all  the  books  of  the  New  Testament  without  exception  (like 
the  Sinaiticus)  contain  the  whole  Bible,  with  the  New 
Testament  and  occasionally  a  few  other  books  for  church 
reading  forming  the  last  volume  (as  in  the  Alexandrinus). 
Elaborately  written  copies  of  the  sacred  writings  sometimes 
extend  to  as  many  as  twelve  volumes.  This  fact  is  confirmed 
by  overwhelming  evidence  from  ecclesiastical  literature ; 
the  far  more  frequent  use  of  plural  than  of  singular  designa- 
tions l  shows  that,  as  far  as  outward  form  was  concerned,  the 
idea  of  unity  did  not  exist ;  and  we  read,  for  instance,  in  the 
protocol  of  a  disputation  between  Augustine  and  the  Mani- 
chaean  Felix,  that  the  former  takes  the  Codex  of  the  Gospel  in 
his  hand  (here  we  find  unity  once  more,  for  TO  svayysXiov  is 
the  usual  name  for  the  four  Gospel  writings :  not  till  later 
does  pedantry  prefer  rsTpasva^sXiov),  reads  something  from 
it,  gives  it  back  again,  and  calls  for  the  book  of  the  Acts  in 
order  to  read  a  passage  from  it  in  like  manner. 

Ancient  manuscripts  of  the  Gospels  are  fairly  plentifully 
preserved  (we  possess  nearly  one  hundred  codices  in  the 
Uncial  hand),  but  the  case  is  less  favourable  with  the  Pauline 
and  Catholic  Epistles  and  the  Acts,  while  the  Apocalypse  is 
extremely  poorly  represented.  In  the  later  Middle  Ages  the 
books  for  reading  aloud,  or  lectionaries,  were  almost  more 
widely  distributed  than  the  New  Testament  Scriptures  them- 
selves ;  they  were  made  to  suit  the  convenience  of  the  priests, 
and  only  contained  the  passages  (pericopae)  intended  for 
public  reading,  and  arranged  according  to  the  order  of  the 
ecclesiastical  year.  Their  history  begins  with  the  sixth 
century,  and  there  was  naturally  very  considerable  variation 
among  them,  since  the  length  of  the  pericopae  might  be,  and 
indeed  was,  very  different  in  different  cases.  It  was  quite 
exceptional  to  unite  the  Evangelic  readings  in  a  single  volume 

1  As  TO.  /JijSAia,  sacrae  sanctae  scripturae,  libri  canonici  etc. 


576      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  11. 

with  the  Apostolic  (i.e.  those  taken  from  the  Acts  and  the 
Epistles),  but  where  this  was  done  it  was  called  an  d7roo-ro\o- 
sva^sKiov.  The  collections  from  the  Gospels  are  often  merely 
called  evaryyE^iov,  or  else  £va<yyE\idpiov  or  svayyeKio-rdpiov 
(but  a  sharp  distinction  cannot  be  drawn  between  these 
terms) ;  those  from  Apostolic  writings,  simply  aTroaroKos  or 
Trpa%a7ro(TTo\os ;  but  these  are  rarer  and  generally  of  later 
origin  than  the  Gospel  collections.  Of  course  extracts  from 
the  New  Testament  found  admission  into  other  liturgical 
MSS. ;  but  this  does  not  interest  us  here,  because  it  did  not 
influence  the  multiplication  of  the  New  Testament  and  is 
altogether  without  importance  for  the  history  of  the  text, 
since  no  fresh  material  can  be  expected  among  such  common 
market  ware. 


§  50.  The  Outward  Form  of  the  Texts  down  to 
about  1500  A.D. 

[Cf.  for  this  and  the  following  sections  C.  E.  Gregory's  '  Pro- 
legomena' in  C.  Tischendorf's  '  Novum  Testamentum  Graece,' 
ed.  8,  vol.  Hi.  (1884,  1890  and  1894.] 

1.  The  exact  time  at  which  papyrus  gave  way  to  parch- 
ment as  writing-material  for  the  sacred  books  cannot  now 
be  determined.  It  probably  happened  at  different  times  in 
different  places — in  Egypt  naturally  later  than  elsewhere  : 
but  soon  after  the  Mohammedan  invasion  in  the  seventh 
century,  papyrus  seems  even  there  to  have  disappeared 
entirely,  even  from  domestic  use.  At  any  rate,  all  that 
Theodorus  of  Mopsuestia,  who  died  in  428,  knows  of  it,  is  that 
many  years  ago,  in  the  time  of  Paul,  men  possessed  the 
Divine  Scriptures  in  the  form  of  rolls.  Jerome  tells  us  that 
between  340  and  380  the  bishops  of  Caesarea  saved  the 
library  formed  in  that  place  by  Origen  and  Pamphilus  from 
decay  by  laboriously  transcribing  everything  it  contained  on 
to  parchment.  Thus  the  greater  part  of  this  library  must 
originally  have  consisted  of  papyrus  rolls,  and  we  may 
probably  consider  the  period  about  300  as  that  of  the  general 


§60.]          OUTWARD    KOKM    OF    TIIK    TKXTS   TO    C.    1500          577 

transition  to  the  use  of  parchment.  In  the  persecution 
of  Diocletian  it  is  in  almost  every  case  the  codices  of  the 
Divine  Law  which  are  sought  for  by  the  authorities  and 
given  up  by  cowardly  Christians ;  if  in  later  times  the 
'  volumina  '  are  still  spoken  of,  it  only  means  that  the  old 
name  had  been  retained  for  the  new  thing. 

It  was,  in  fact,  very  difficult  to  convert  stiff  parchment, 
ill  adapted  as  it  was  to  the  process  of  gluing,  into  rolls  ;  the 
usual  practice  was  to  fold  the  leaves  over  in  the  middle, 
and  then  to  lay  several  of  them  one  inside  the  other,  or  one 
on  the  top  of  the  other ;  booklets  thus  produced  could  be 
fastened  together  by  the  binder  in  any  desired  number, 
making  a  volume  resembling  the  form  of  our  present  books.1 
As  a  rule,  such  a  folio  consisted  of  four  double  leaves 
(quaternio)  and  more  rarely  of  five  ;  one,  two,  or  three  were 
scarcely  ever  used  except  at  the  end  of  a  book,  when  a  complete 
folio  was  not  needed.  Both  sides  were  written  on,  and  thus 
it  consisted  on  an  average  of  sixteen  pages,  like  a  printer's 
sheet  of  to-day.  Some  particularly  strong  material,  such  as 
wood,  sometimes  covered  with  leather  or  silk,  was  chosen  for 
the  binding  of  the  folios,  which,  when  put  together,  were 
often  very  thick ;  for  the  finely  dressed  parchment  of  ancient 
times  now  disappears  for  the  sake  of  greater  durability. 
The  fact  that  economical  owners  were  often  tempted  to  make 
more  than  one  use  of  their  parchment  is  in  a  sense  a  mis- 
fortune, but  often  turns  out  the  reverse.  If  a  library  already 
contained  several  copies  of  the  New  Testament,  but  not  the 
works  of  some  revered  father  of  the  Church,  the  addition  was 
made  without  expense  by  scratching  out  the  original  writing 
(in  case  it  was  not  already  faded  enough)  in  one  of  the  New 
Testament  parchments,  and  writing  the  desired  text  over  the 
old,  or  between  the  lines,  or  occasionally,  but  not  often,  cross- 
wise. Such  manuscripts  are  called  Palimpsests  (codices  re- 
scrip ti,  and  sometimes  even  bis  rescripti).  The  original 
writing,  which  can  often  only  be  made  legible  by  means  of 
chemical  reagents,  is  generally  the  most  interesting  to  us  ; 
whatever  fragments  we  possess  of  the  Gothic  translation  of  the 
New  Testament  and  of  the  oldest  Syriac  version  of  the  Gospels 

TTVKT'IOV,  (TCDjuariov,  in  Latin  =  codex. 

P  P 


578       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [_CHAP.  n. 

have  come  down  to  us  for  the  most  part  from  '  Codices 
rescript!.'  On  the  other  hand,  from  the  fourth  century 
onwards  the  Bible  manuscripts  were  often  prepared  with 
extravagant  splendour  ;  parchment  of  marble  whiteness  and 
of  the  greatest  delicacy  was  procured,  gold  and  silver  letters 
were  painted  on  a  ground  of  purple — as  in  the  '  Codex 
Argenteus '  of  the  Gothic  translation  of  the  Gospels  at  Upsala 
— and  the  cover  richly  adorned  with  jewels  and  fitted  with 
costly  clasps  ;  while  the  decorations  which  were  inserted  in 
the  margins  of  the  manuscripts,  especially  at  the  beginning  of 
the  book,  belong  to  the  most  valuable  material  for  the  history 
of  Christian  Art. 

Paper,  a  cheaper  writing-material  than  parchment,  at  last 
took  its  place  in  the  cultivated  world  about  the  shores  of  the 
Mediterranean ;  it  was  apparently  invented  by  the  Chinese, 
and  made  out  of  linen  rags.  It  was  known  to  the  Greeks  as 
early  as  the  eighth  century,  and  from  this  time  onwards 
leaves  of  linen,  as  formerly  of  papyrus,  are  to  be  met  with 
between  the  parchment  pages.  The  traditional  material, 
however,  was  long  preferred  for  New  Testament  manuscripts. 
It  was  not  till  after  the  fourteenth  century  that  the  parch- 
ment manuscripts  disappeared  entirely,  and  the  '  Codices 
bombycini,'  and  '  chartacei '  replaced  the  '  Codices  mem- 
branacei,'  though  retaining  in  all  other  respects  the  appear- 
ance of  the  older  books. 

2.  When  the  Emperor  Constantine  commissioned  Bishop 
Eusebius  of  Caesarea  to  provide  him  with  fifty  copies  of  the 
Holy  Scriptures  for  the  newly  built  churches  of  his  capital 
on  the  Bosphorus,  he  expressly  desired  that  they  should  be 
very  legible  and  of  a  convenient  size  for  general  use.  In  the 
latter  respect  tastes  and  necessities  varied  with  the  times, 
but  in  general  the  tendency  to  a  decrease  in  size  is  unmistak- 
able in  the  history  of  the  codices.  When  Jerome  bewailed  the 
unwieldy  bulk  of  the  codices  then  in  vogue  he  was  probably 
not  thinking  only  of  their  thickness.  Among  the  parchment 
manuscripts  still  extant  we  may  find  examples  of  the  large 
folio,  the  quarto,  and  the  small  and  dainty  octavo — the  last 
a  sign  of  a  comparatively  modern  age.  The  manuscripts  we 
possess  of  the  Greek  New  Testament  never,  so  far  as  we  know, 


§50.]          OUTWARD    FORM    OF    THK    TKXTS    TO    C.    1500          570 

exceed  a  size  of  18  inches  in  height  by  16  in  breadth  ;  a 
very  general  medium  size  is  12  by  8.  The  parchment  pages 
were  originally  considerably  higher  than  the  average  of  those 
made  of  papyrus,  and  also  of  correspondingly  greater  breadth  ; 
thus  if  the  copyist  still  wished  to  keep  to  the  usual  length  of 
the  lines  on  a  papyrus  page,  and  was  yet  unwilling  to  leave 
such  enormous  margins  unused,  he  simply  divided  each  page 
of  the  parchment  into  several  columns,  clearly  separated  from 
one  another  by  a  small  space  :  the  Sinaiticus  has  four  such 
columns,  the  Vaticanus  three,  but  it  is  more  usual  to  find  only 
two.  Even  some  of  the  quite  ancient  manuscripts,  however, 
have  their  lines  running  across  from  margin  to  margin,  and 
when  it  became  the  custom  to  cover  the  text  with  all  manner 
of  auxiliary  apparatus,  equally  wide  margins  were  needed  for 
every  portion,  so  that  this  also  contributed  to  the  abandon- 
ment of  the  older  fashion. 

3.  A  change  in  the  nature  of  the  writing-materials,  how- 
ever, need  not  necessarily  have  brought  about  a  change 
in  the  characters  used.  Not  until  the  ninth  century  are  the 
uncial  letters,  which  had  been  retained  until  then,  supplanted 
by  the  cursive  hand,  but  even  then  in  such  a  manner 
that  the  conservatism  of  the  Church  long  clung  to  the  older 
custom — in  fact,  until  late  in  the  eleventh  century — as  is 
proved  by  a  great  number  of  lectionaries.  The  cursive  hand 
is  also  called  the  Minuscule,  and  the  uncial  the  Majuscule. 
But  it  is  not  principally  the  height  or  even  the  general  size 
of  the  single  letters  which  makes  the  distinction  between  the 
two  methods  of  writing  ;  large  and  coarsely  written  minuscules 
on  the  one  hand,  and  very  fine  and  delicate  uncials  on  the 
other,  are  not  uncommon.  Naturally,  moreover,  the  change  did 
not  come  about  without  some  preparation.  The  uncial  writ- 
ing had  gradually  dropped  more  and  more  of  its  old  beautiful 
features,  the  letters  had  become  narrower  and  more  pointed, 
and  had  begun  to  slant  to  one  side  ;  the  practice  of  joining 
several  letters  together  was  growing  commoner  ;  the  differences 
in  length — as  for  instance  between  Iota  and  Rho — increased  ; 
we  find  in  fact  that  a  semi-uncial  hand  was  developing.  In 
the  case  of  the  cursive  hand  still  more,  almost  a  new  alphabet 
had  at  last  been  produced  ;  we  can  still  perceive  its  relationship 

p  p  2 


580      AN    INTRODUCTION    TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

to  the  original  form  of  the  letter,  but  everything  has  become 
smoother,  partly  through  abbreviation  and  partly  through  the 
separation  of  words,  though  always  with  the  tendency  to  make 
the  fewest  possible  strokes,  and  to  lift  the  pen  as  seldom  as 
possible.  This  form  of  writing,  too,  underwent  many  develop- 
ments ;  it  borrowed  again  and  again  from  the  old  uncial 
letters,  and  it  is  the  foundation  of  our  modern  Greek  hand. 
It  is  not  the  fault  of  the  cursive  hand,  but  of  its  innumerable 
abbreviations,  that  the  manuscripts  of  the  later  Middle  Ages 
are  in  general  so  difficult  to  read  ;  whole  words  are  often 
represented  in  them  by  a  single  hieroglyph,  while  in  the  old 
manuscripts  such  abbreviations  are  but  rarely  found,  and  then 
only  in  the  case  of  constantly  recurring  words  (e.g.  KN  for 
rcvpiov,  ANIl  for  avOpMTTw,  UNA  for  TTVEV/JLO).  With  the 
minuscule,  again,  it  now  becomes  the  rule  to  separate  the 
words  by  dots  or  by  a  space,  and  to  insert  punctuation  and 
signs ;  but  after  the  eighth  century  these  are  also  found  in 
uncial  codices,  and  are  apparently  not  merely  the  insertions  of 
a  later  hand.  Individual  scribes  well  versed  in  the  rules  of 
grammar  made  accented  copies  (Kara  Trpoaw&tav)  of  the  Books 
of  the  Bible  as  early  as  the  fourth  and  fifth  centuries,  but 
this  attempt  had  no  permanent  success. 

Most  of  the  good  codices  are  carefully  and  evenly  written  ; 
the  scribe  drew  lines  to  help  himself  (and  in  the  case  of  fine 
parchment  it  was  only  necessary  to  do  this  on  one  side),  some- 
times single  ones,  in  which  case  the  letters  were  merely 
written  upon  them,  and  sometimes  double,  when  they  were 
inserted  between  the  two  ;  the  space  between  two  such  rows 
would  then  be  about  equal  to  the  height  of  the  row  itself. 
The  number  of  rows  on  each  page  depended  on  the  shape  of 
the  codex  and  the  copyist's  manner  of  writing :  in  the 
Sinaiticus  there  are  48  on  a  page  ;  in  the  Vaticanus,  although 
it  is  much  less  in  height,  42  ;  in  the  Codex  H  of  the  Pauline 
Epistles,  16,  although  it  is  about  an  inch  higher  than  the 
Yaticanus ;  in  the  codex  A  of  the  Gospels,  the  number  varies 
between  17  and  25.  A  single  column  of  the  Sinaiticus  takes  on 
an  average  about  12  letters,  of  the  Vaticanus  about  17,  of  the 
Alexandrinus  about  21,  of  the  Codex  Ephraemi  S  about  40  ; 
thus,  counting  the  columns  together,  there  are  respectively 


§60.]          OUTWAKD    WRM    OF    THE    TEXTS    TO    C.    1500  681 

48,  51,  42,  and  40  letters  on  each  line.  As  the  line  represents 
a  mere  unit  of  space  (and  not  of  sense),  words  are  sometimes 
broken  off  at  the  end  of  them  without  a  hyphen,  e.g.  TTSI 
paapov,  but  this  hardly  ever  occurs  in  the  middle  of  a 
syllable. 

4.  But  scarcely  a  single  writer  of  the  New  Testament 
manuscripts  known  to  us  was  content  to  reproduce  his 
original  without  any  regard  to  the  meaning  of  the  text — that 
is,  without  giving  his  readers  some  assistance  towards  the 
understanding  of  it.  At  the  beginning  of  a  new  paragraph 
the  Sinaiticus  makes  the  first  letter  project  into  the  left-hand 
margin,  and  from  the  fifth  century  onwards  it  became  usual  to 
distinguish  these  initial  letters  by  their  special  size  as  well — 
later  even  to  paint  them  with  some  colour,  mostly  red.  Then 
from  the  single  letter  several  came  to  be  treated  in  this  way, 
till  at  last  the  whole  first  word  was  coloured.  But  the  needs 
of  the  reader  (and  of  the  church  reader  in  particular)  were 
met  comparatively  early  by  a  much  more  comprehensive 
plan.  The  New  Testament  text  was  split  up  into  a  series  of 
sense-units,  written  in  such  a  manner  that  the  beginning  and 
end  of  £ach  unit  must  be  clearly  perceptible,  whether  it  filled 
the  space  of  one  or  more  actual  lines.  This  was,  however,  a 
costly  undertaking,  as  by  this  method  half  lines  and  more 
had  constantly  to  be  left  blank  ;  and  indeed  it  was  probably 
on  this  account  that  the  system  disappeared,  even  before  a 
better  substitute  was  found  for  it  in  a  rational  system  of 
punctuation.  This  Colometric  *  method  of  writing  appears 
to  have  been  introduced  into  the  sacred  literature  of  the 
Greeks  by  Origen — at  first  only  for  the  Psalms,  in  which 
the  nature  of  Hebrew  poetry  determined  the  limits  of  the 
sentences  automatically.  Thus  in  his  '  Hexapla '  he  could 
give  a  comprehensive  view  of  all  the  seven  different  Greek 
translations  beside  the  original  text.  When  Jerome  had  his 
Latin  translation  of  Isaiah  written  out  in  separate  versicles 
of  this  sort  ( '  per  cola  et  commata  ' — and  even  Cassiodorius 
made  the  mistake  of  applying  the  words  to  the  punc- 
tuation-marks so  named  in  modern  times  ! )  he  warned  his 

1  A  KU\OV,  according  to  Augustine,  De  Doctr.  Chr.  iv.  7  =  Lat.  membrum, 
phrase. 


582       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

readers  against  the  error  of  supposing  that  they  were  dealing 
with  poetical  verses,  and  excused  himself  by  saying  that  this 
method  was  employed  in  the  works  of  Demosthenes  and 
Cicero,  although  indeed  he  was  quite  conscious  of  the  novelty 
of  applying  it  to  the  prose  books  of  the  Bible.1  For  this 
reason  alone,  then,  those  New  Testament  manuscripts  in 
which  this  practical  method  is  adopted  could  not  well  have 
been  written  before  the  fifth  century  ;  the  most  famous  of  this 
kind  are :  for  the  Gospels,  Codex  D  ;  for  the  Acts,  Codex  E  ; 
and  for  the  Pauline  Epistles,  Codex  H.2  The  average  length 
of  one  of  these  sense-units  differs  very  much  according  to  the 
different  ideas  of  the  writers  as  to  what  might  be  called  the 
'  smallest  complete  sentence ' ;  the  Laudianus  (Codex  E)  has 
particularly  short  units,  but  those  of  most  of  the  others  are 
also  rather  shorter  than  our  present  verses.  Where  a 
'  colon '  required  several  lines,  the  auxiliary  lines  were 
designated  as  such  by  inserting  them  between  the  usual  ruled 
lines  ;  but  it  is  clear  that  all  kinds  of  confusion  must  have 
arisen  in  this  respect  on  recopying. 

Unfortunately,  this  method  of  writing  in  units  of  sense 
has  often  been  designated  the  stichometric  method  ;  but 
stichometry  is  in  reality  not  a  manner  of  writing  at  all,  but  a 
system  of  measuring  off  the  texts  when  written.  Even  as 
early  as  the  Codex  Sinaiticus,  notes  are  inserted  in  the  margin 
beside  most  of  the  Pauline  Epistles — though  it  is  true  they 
are  in  a  somewhat  later  hand — giving  the  number  of  stichi 
in  these  Epistles.  ST^OP,  Latin  versus,  is  a  mechanical 
division,  and  it  is  not  till  the  time  of  the  Byzantines  that  we 
find  it  used  to  denote  a  sentence.  The  intermediate  stage 
between  the  two  meanings  is  furnished  by  the  poetical  Books 
of  the  Old  Testament  ((3lp\oi  o-Ti^paC)  because  there  every 
'  verse,'  i.e.,  the  smallest  complete  phrase,  filled  exactly  one 
line.  In  the  case  of  prose  works  this  attention  paid  to  the 
lines  is  at  first  sight  somewhat  surprising,  and  in  reality  we 
find  that  all  the  Pauline  Epistles  in  the  Sinaiticus  take  up 
many  more  lines  than  the  number  of  o-T^ot  given.  But  the 
stichus  had  long  become  a  technical  term  in  the  bookselling 
trade,  a  unit  of  measurement  for  written  work  familiar  to 

1  '  Novo  gcribendi  genere  distinximus.'  *  See  §  62,  2. 


§50.]          OUTWARD    FORM    OF    TI1K    TKXTS    TO    C.    1500          583 

every  expert;  thus  Josephus  reckons  the  contents  of  liis 
'Archaeology'  at  60,000  stichi,  and  Origen,  without  making  any 
definite  calculation,  can  say  of  the  second  and  third  Epistles 
of  John,  that  they  were  less  than  100  stichi  long.  The 
hexameter  was  the  foundation  of  this  unit  of  measurement ; 
12  to  19  syllables,  or  32  to  44  letters,  were  probably  the  usual 
amount  for  a  stichus.  Prices  could  only  be  settled  accurately 
with  the  calligrapher  or  the  bookseller  by  the  help  of  the 
stichic  measurement,  and  it  is  no  wonder,  then,  that  the 
number  of  stichi  was  calculated  in  the  New  Testament  Books 
too,  and  the  result  noted  down  in  the  post-scriptum.  But 
this  does  not  necessarily  mean  that  the  books  were  written  out 
so  as  to  correspond  with  this  number  (i.e.  in  lines  of  exactly 
the  length  of  a  hexameter) ;  the  conditions  of  space  often 
prevented  this,  and  the  end  was  attained  by  inserting  the 
number  of  stichi  in  the  margin  at  intervals  of  50,  and  also 
at  the  ends  of  longer  paragraphs,  while  the  numbers  for 
each  individual  Book  of  the  New  Testament  were  added  up 
in  a  separate  note. 

From  the  sixth  century  onwards  we  scarcely  ever  find  a 
Greek  manuscript  in  which  the  numbers  of  the  stichi  are  not 
given  in  this  way,  and  those  for  the  Acts  and  the  Epistles 
usually  agree  with  those  of  the  so-called  *  Text  of  Euthalius/ 
though  even  in  their  case  attempts  at  a  different  mode  of 
reckoning  are  by  no  means  unknown.  When  we  remember 
the  endless  copying  and  re-copying  which  these  very  unstable 
figures  must  have  undergone,  we  must,  of  course,  expect  to  find 
many  mistakes  among  them,  for  they  were  probably  never 
corrected  by  the  process  of  re-counting.  When,  as  some- 
times occurs,  the  numbers  of  the  prjo-sis  or  pr^aTa  are  given 
instead  of,  or  as  well  as,  those  of  the  stichi,  it  means  that  a 
different  authority  from  that  for  the  stichi  has  been  followed, 
though  with  the  same  intention ;  the  totals  of  the  '  sentences  * 
are  too  nearly  identical  with  those  of  the  stichi  to  admit  of 
the  supposition  that  a  different  principle  of  reckoning  was 
adopted  in  their  case. 

[For  the  following  cf .  the  '  Collectanea  Monumentorum  veterum 
Ecclesiae  Graecae '  of  L.  A.  Zaccagni,  published  in  Rome  in  1698 
(vol.  i.  pp.  liv-xci  and  401-708).  See  also  ibid.  p.  724  :  '  Euthalii 


584       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

Episcopi  Sulcensis  Actuum  Apostolorum  et  xiv  Sancti  Pauli 
aliaruinque  Catholicarum  Epistolarum  editio  ad  Athanasium 
juniorem  Episcop.  Alex.  .  .  .  graece  et  latine  edita.'  Also  J.  A. 
Robinson's  article  on  '  Euthaliana '  in  'Texts  and  Studies/  iii.  3, 
1895 ;  and  E.  von  Dobschiitz  on  '  Euthaliusstudien '  in  the 
'  Zeitschrift  fur  die  Kirchengeschichte,'  part  xix.  1898,  pp.  107  fol., 
and  on  '  Euthalius  '  in  the  '  Protestantische  Real-Encyclopadie  ' 
(edited  by  Hauck),  part  v.  1898.] 

5.  But  the  New  Testament  text  was  not  only  copied  out 
in  more  or  less  practical  form ;  as  in  the  Masoretic  version  of 
the  Old,  it  underwent  a  peculiar  form  of  elaboration,  and  was 
in  fact  surrounded  by  a  mass  of  auxiliary  notes  of  all  kinds. 
I  am  not  referring  here  to  the  'Catenae'  (see  pp.  599  fol.), 
although  in  the  later  Middle  Ages  scarcely  a  single  Greek  text 
of  the  New  Testament  was  allowed  to  appear  without  them  ; 
nor  to  the  increasingly  copious  postscripts  giving  information 
as  to  the  original  language  and  the  author  of  each  document, 
and  the  place  and  time  of  its  composition  ;  nor  to  the  tables  of 
contents  ]  at  the  beginnings,  and  all  the  later  amplifications  of 
the  older  and  shorter  superscriptions.2  In  addition  to  these 
a  learned  apparatus  of  the  most  diverse  character  and  value 
was  added  to  the  text,  and  vestiges  of  this  are  still  to  be 
found  even  in  the  latest  printed  editions. 

In  this  sphere  of  activity  the  master  and  pioneer 
appeared  until  recently  to  be  a  certain  Euthalius  of  Alex- 
andria, whose  work  was  dated  by  its  first  editor,  Zaccagni,  at 
458.  The  mystery  in  which  this  remarkable  book  used  to 
be  wrapped  is  not  yet  quite  cleared  away,  but,  owing  to  the 
searching  investigations  of  Eobinson  and  von  Dobschiitz  in 
particular,  we  now  possess  the  certain  knowledge  that  the 
Euthalius  of  Zaccagni  did  not  constitute  a  literary  entity  at  all, 
but  was  a  compilation  put  together  by  different  hands  from 
materials  belonging  to  different  periods,  practically  complete 
as  early  as  the  fourth  century,  though  enlarged  even  after 
the  year  600  by  additions  from  other  sources.  Whether  a 
Euthalius  was  at  least  one  of  the  revisers — possibly  the  editor 
of  the  year  396— remains  an  open  question  until  these  manu- 

1  viroQeo-fis. 

2  E.g.,  instead  of  irpd^ts  airo(rr6\<av,  irpd^fis  rwv  ayiuv  airo<rrJAa»>,  and  later 
still  '  written  by  the  holy  Apostle  and  Evangelist  Luke.' 


§50.]          OUTWARD    FORM    OF    Till:    TKXTS    To    V.    1000  585 

scripts  have  been  more  accurately  and  fully  examined,  for 
then  only  will  it  be  possible  to  determine  his  share  in  the 
work  of  compilation.  The  very  diverse  elements  that  go  to 
make  up  the  Corpus  Euthalianiun  an;  held  together  by  one 
interest  only — that  of  presenting  the  Apostolic  writings  to 
the  Church  conveniently  arranged  and  adapted  for  study,  ac- 
cording to  the  approved  models  of  Greek  scholastic  learning. 
We  do  not  yet  know  whether  the  text  which  the  so-called 
Euthalius  used  as  the  foundation  for  his  work  was  a  particularly 
good  one  ;  but  in  any  case  he  wrote  it  in  *  sense-units  '  from 
beginning  to  end,  furnished  it  with  stichometry,  carefully 
identified  all  the  quotations  to  be  found  in  it,  both  sacred  and 
profane,  prepared  indices  for  these  quotations,  and  made  the 
consultation  of  them  easy  by  a  complicated  system  of  in- 
serting figures  in  the  margin  opposite  the  place  containing  the 
quotation.  In  addition  to  all  this  he  contributed  short 
prefaces  to  the  Epistles,  chronological  sketches  of  the  life  and 
death  of  Paul,  and  other  embryonic  attempts  at  an  *  Introduc- 
tion to  the  New  Testament.' 

But  probably  the  most  useful  part  of  all  this  work  was 
his  division  of  the  Acts  and  the  Epistles  into  longer  and 
shorter  sections.  The  Acts,  for  instance,  we  find  divided  into 
forty  chapters  (Ks<f>a\cua),  of  which  the  first  and  second 
together  form  what  is  now  our  first,  and  the  third  our  present 
second.  In  most  of  these,  again,  subdivisions  (vTrobuupeasis) 
are  added,  always  beginning  lower  down  than  the  beginning 
of  the  chapter  proper  ;  e.g.,  in  the  Euthalian  chapter  iii.  they 
begin  at  what  are  now  verses  ii.  14,  ii.  17,  ii.  22,  ii.  37,  and 
ii.  42.  The  numbers  of  these  sections  are  again  noted  on 
the  margin  of  the  text,  by  means  of  red  pigment.  But  the 
indices  to  the  chapters  and  sections  do  not  consist  in  simple 
numbering,  or  in  the  mere  giving  of  the  initial  words,  but 
an  attempt  is  made  in  them— and  by  no  means  unskil- 
fully— to  summarise  the  contents.  The  seventh  chapter  of 
Komans,  for  instance  (verses  vi.  1-23  in  our  version),  is  thus 
described :  '  Concerning  the  good  conduct  which  ought  to 
accompany  faith';  chapter  xvii.  (=vv.  xii.  1-3)  thus, 
'  Injunctions  concerning  virtue  towards  God  and  men ' ; 
section  a  (vv.  xii.  3  fol.)  thus,  '  On  concord '  ;  section  8 


586      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

(vv.  xiii  1  fol.)  thus,  '  On  obedience  to  the  higher  powers.' 
Lastly,  considerably  larger  sections  are  formed  by  putting 
together  several  chapters  to  make  one  lesson  (dvd^vwcns).1 
These,  too,  are  of  very  varying  length,  but  the  author  of 
these  old  pericopae  evidently  had  the  object  in  view  of 
dividing  the  whole  body  of  the  Apostolic  writings  into  Lessons 
embracing  a  complete  ecclesiastical  year  of  fifty-seven  services. 

This  ideal  could  never  be  maintained  in  the  public  worship 
of  the  communities,  and  thus  the  Lessons  of  Euthalius  never 
attained  any  very  wide  acceptance.  But  his  chapters  and  all 
the  rest  of  his  arrangements  played  all  the  more  important  a 
part  in  the  Greek  and  Syriac  Bibles.  He  never  won  complete 
and  sole  recognition,  however- — still  less  in  the  case  of  the 
Acts  and  Catholic  Epistles  than  in  that  of  Paul  -  and  the 
Gospels,  which  he  never  touched,  had  already  been  satisfac- 
torily arranged  in  chapters  before  his  day. 

The  Latins  gave  the  name  of  breves  to  what  the  Greeks 
called  Ks^)d\aia  (and  also  rtrXot,  Trspio^ai,  and  TrspiKoiraC),  a 
word  which  had  at  first  undoubtedly  signified  the  summary 
of  contents  at  the  beginning  of  the  chapters,  and  was  not 
applied  until  later  to  the  chapters  themselves.  The  now 
universally  adopted  system  of  division  was  introduced  in  the 
beginning  of  the  thirteenth  century  by  Stephen  Langton, 
Chancellor  of  the  University  of  Paris,  principally  for  the  sake 
of  convenience  in  quotation  and  reference,  and  with  this 
object  he  aimed  at  as  close  a  similarity  as  possible  between  the 
lengths  of  the  chapters.  This  innovation  soon  made  its  way 
into  all  Latin  Bible-manuscripts  ;  and  as  it  was  in  the  West 
too  that  the  first  printed  versions  of  the  Greek  Bible  appeared, 
it  naturally  followed  that  the  approved  arrangement  should 
also  have  been  introduced  into  those  versions.  The  fact  that 
in  an  arrangement  so  indispensable  in  our  eyes  to  the 
scientific  and  edificatory  use  of  the  Scriptures,  unity  was  not 
attained  until  after  a  thousand  years  of  diversity,  can  only  be 
explained  by  the  circumstances  of  the  times ;  we  can,  in  fact, 
barely  understand  that  up  to  the  end  of  the  fourth  century 
such  divisions  were  dispensed  with  altogether  ;  for  when  earlier 
writers,  such  as  Clement  of  Alexandria,  Origen,  or  Dionysius  of 

1  Acts  has  16    Cath.  Ep.  10  ;  Pauline  Ep.  13. 


§50.]  OUTWARD    FORM    OF   TIIK    TKXTS   TO    C.    1600          587 

Alexandria,  speak  of  Pericopae  and  chapters  in  connection 
with  New  Testament  Books,  they  only  mean  divisions  accord- 
ing to  the  sense,  which  the  observant  reader  perceived  to  be 
wholes  complete  in  themselves,  but  which  need  not  for  that 
reason  have  been  marked  upon  the  text.  And  in  fact  that 
they  were  not  so  marked  can  be  proved  from  the  language 
of  Jerome. 

Eusebius,  who  was  the  first  to  undertake  the  subdivision 
of  the  four  Gospels  (he  made  1162  chapters  out  of  them),  did 
so  with  the  sole  object  of  giving  the  reader  a  synoptic  survey 
of  the  parallel  passages  within  them.  To  accomplish  this, 
therefore,  he  seeks  and  carefully  marks  out  the  passages  in 
each  Gospel  for  which  parallel  passages  can  be  found  in  the 
three  others,  in  two  of  them,  or  in  one,  or  for  which  there  are 
no  parallels  at  all ;  then  counts  up  the  sections  thus  obtained 
in  each  case  (e.g.,  355  for  Matthew,  232  for  John),  some  of 
which  are  infinitesimal,  and  others  (especially  in  John)  of  con- 
siderable length,  and  prepares  a  table  of  ten  rubrics  (rcavovss), 
in  the  first  of  which  he  sets  down  the  passages  common  to  all 
four  Gospels,  in  the  second  those  common  to  Matthew,  Mark, 
and  Luke,  and  so  on.  The  tenth  gives  those  passages  peculiar 
to  Matthew,  Mark,  Luke,  or  John,  in  four  separate  columns. 
When  the  numbers  of  these  chapters  as  well  as  those  of 
the  rubric  to  which  each  belonged  were  correctly  noted  in 
the  margins,  it  would  not  be  difficult  to  obtain  a  synoptic  view 
of  any  given  portion  of  the  Gospels  with  tolerable  rapidity  and 
with  sufficient  accuracy  to  satisfy  the  demands  of  that  age. 
The  plan  of  this  work,  of  which  Eusebius  speaks  in  his 
dedication  to  Carpianus,  had  occurred  to  him  while  making 
use  of  a  '  Diatessaron  '  by  Ammonius  of  Alexandria  l  ;  this 
man  had  wished  to  attain  the  same  end — though  at  the 
expense  of  Mark,  Luke,  and  John — by  adding  to  the  complete 
text  of  Matthew  the  corresponding  sections  from  the  other 
Evangelists.  Unfortunately,  this  Eusebian  apparatus  was  too 
complicated  to  be  handed  on  without  corruption,  and  a  few 
mistakes  would  have  vitiated  it  all ;  but  it  is  characteristic  of 
the  conservatism  of  the  Church  that  almost  all  the  Gospel 
manuscripts  from  the  sixth  to  the  sixteenth  century  possess  it, 

1  Probably  about  250. 


588      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

although  all  interest  in  these  comparative  studies  had  long 
died  out.  Far  more  useful  to  the  clerical  owner  were  the 
marginal  notes,  a  (ap-^rf)  and  r  (reXos-),  which  marked  the 
beginning  and  the  end  of  the  Lessons  for  Sundays,  Saints'  days 
and  festivals,  and  are  regularly  found  in  all  New  Testament 
manuscripts  after  the  ninth  century,  while  accurate  indices 
of  these  pericopae  may  also  be  found  attached  to  them. 

All  this  supplementary  matter,  which  bears  witness  to  the 
labour  of  the  Church  on  the  sacred  text,  does  not  deserve 
special  attention  on  account  of  its  possible  value  in  the 
history  of  the  Church,  of  literature,  or  of  culture — for  no  very 
excessive  intelligence,  after  all,  went  to  the  production  of  it — 
but  it  is  often  full  of  significance  for  the  history  of  the  New 
Testament  Text,  as  giving  useful  indications  concerning  the 
origin,  antiquity,  birthplace  and  mutual  relationship  of  the 
different  manuscripts.  As  a  rule,  it  is  the  mistakes  it  contains 
which  render  the  best  services  in  this  respect. 

§  51.  The  Material  History  of  the  Text  down  to 
about  1500  A.D. 

1.  The  history  of  the  New  Testament  text  during  this 
period  is  the  history  of  its  corruption,  or  at  the  best  of 
futile  attempts  to  stay  its  corruption.  Wherever  the  repro- 
duction of  documents  of  some  length  is  not  carried  out  by 
mechanical  means,  but  by  individual  labour,  the  copy  will 
always  vary  in  some  degree  from  the  original ;  every  new 
copy  brings  with  it  new  mistakes,  and  when  we  consider 
the  enormous  number  of  manuscripts  in  which  we  possess  the 
New  Testament  Books,  it  is  no  wonder  that  the  whole  body  of 
the  texts  can  only  be  shown  to  agree  in  a  few  words  here  and 
there.  The  painful  anxiety  about  every  letter  and  every 
apostrophe,  with  which  Judaism  propagated  the  Masoretic 
text  of  the  Old  Testament,  was  never  the  portion  of  the  New 
(whose  Masoretes,  in  fact,  did  not  arise  until  1590-92)  ;  in 
the  important  period,  the  first  centuries,  the  words  were 
handled  with  a  freedom  incomprehensible  to  us  ;  and  when 
the  sacredness  of  the  letter  had  at  last  impressed  itself  upon 
the  universal  consciousness — even  of  the  copyist — and  men 


§51.]        MATERIAL    HISTORY    OK    Till:    THAT    To    C.    l-"i<>0        f)89 

set  themselves  seriously  to  reproduce  the  text  of  the  codices 
they  had  before  them  as  correctly  as  possible,  and  to  elimi- 
nate mistakes  by  comparing  their  copies  afresh  with  the 
originals  or  with  other  ancient  manuscripts,  it  was  too  late ; 
they  only  succeeded  in  securing  a  position  of  authority  for  an 
already  corrupted  text. 

The  variants  (different  readings)  are  most  numerous  in 
the  Gospels,  precisely  because  these  were  the  most  frequently 
copied,  and  extend  to  punctuation  marks,  letters,  words, 
phrases,  sentences,  and  even  entire  sections ;  they  con- 
sist, moreover,  in  substitution,  transposition,  omission  or 
addition,  and  arose  for  the  most  part  unintentionally,  but 
also  (and  this  is  a  distinction  full  of  importance  for  our 
purpose)  by  design,  these  latter  being  by  far  the  older  and 
the  more  significant.  Many  readings  may  be  recognised  as 
mistakes  at  the  first  glance ;  on  the  other  hand,  there  are 
many  cases  in  which  it  is  very  difficult,  if  not  impossible,  to 
decide  whether  they  are  the  original  readings  or  have  been 
introduced  by  some  scribe.  Complaints  about  the  stupidity 
of  the  copyists  date  from  the  earliest  times  and  are  particu- 
larly loud  in  the  West  (see,  for  instance,  Cassiodorius) , 
because  in  their  intercourse  with  Greek  scholars,  the  Latins 
could  not  help  noticing  the  great  difference  between  their 
texts  and  the  Greek.  Jerome  says  somewhere  that  every 
manuscript  possessed  a  separate  text.  But  even  Origen  can 
no  longer  show  a  naive  faith  in  one  definite  manuscript ;  he 
is  familiar  with  the  manifold  sources  of  corruption,  and  can 
only  hope  to  get  back  to  the  Apostolic  original  by  a  comparison 
of  several  different  texts.  Nor  can  Augustine  himself  l  deny 
that  in  some  places  the  variants  in  the  copies  of  the  Scrip- 
tures affected  the  very  sense,  the  train  of  thought ;  although 
indeed  he  was  sufficiently  optimistic  to  hope  that  the 
uncertainty  might  be  removed  by  the  methodical  work 
of  theologians.  It  matters  little  whether  there  are  30,000 
or  100,000  variants  in  the  New  Testament  manuscripts ;  but 
the  fact  is  of  the  utmost  importance  that  the  Christian 
Church  lived  for  many  centuries  in  spite  of  —  nay,  upon — an 

1  Contra  Faust  urn,  xi.  2. 


590      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

exceedingly  corrupt  sacred  text ;  nor  will  she  ever  possess  one 
that  is  absolutely  free  from  error. 

2.  The  unintentional  alterations  are,  as  a  rule,  the  least 
harmful.     Slips  of  the  pen,  for  instance,  such  as  Swrai  for 
Svi'avrai,  in  Mark  ii.   19,  have  but  a  very  slender  chance  of 
establishing  themselves.     Faults  of  memory  are  not  generally 
dangerous,  at  any  rate  to  the  sense,  since  the  copyist  probably 
retained  the  correct  idea,  though  failing  to  retain  the  original 
expression :    such    is    the    encroachment    of   avaxplvai  for 
SiaKpivat  in  1.  Cor.  vi.  5,  or  the  interchange  or  simultaneous 
use  of  the  names  Jesus  and  Christ  for  the  Lord.     To  this 
class  also  belong  permutations  such  as  that  of  2.  Cor.  xi.  23, 
where    the   reading   sv    Tr^yals   Trepicraorspws,  sv    fyvXaicals 
v7T£ppa\\6vTws  is  scarcely  better  attested  than  sv  <f>v\a/cai$ 
Trspicro-OTspcos,    sv    7r\ijyals    v7rsp/3aX\6vTa)$,    or     sv    TrXyyals 
v7rep/3a\\6vTO)$,  sv  <f)v\aKal$  Trepio-croTspcos  ;  or  variants  such 
as  /ca/jLoi  for   teal  spot,  svOvs  for   svOsws,   vTrspSKTrspio-aov  for 
vTTspsKTrspioro-ws,  on  for  SioTi,  Trews  for  Ti ,  but  the  most  vexa- 
tious of  these  are  the  confusions  between  related  prepositions 
and  conjunctions,  such  as  airo  and  SK,  Trspi  and  vjrsp,  yap  and  Be, 
yap  and  ovv,  Be  and  ovv,  apa  and  St,6 — if  indeed  the  conjunction 
is  not  entirely  omitted  or  even  arbitrarily  inserted.     Such  mis- 
takes as  the  substitution  of  the  particle  apa  for  the  participle 
apas  in  1.  Cor.  vi.  15,  or  of  l^etpofjisvoL  for  ofjbsipo^svoi,  oos  savrov 
for  coy  o-savrov  (an  error  favoured  by  the  scriptio  continual), 
os   for  6 sos    (which  when  abbreviated   was  written   0s),  are 
merely  due  to  inaccurate  copying  ;  letters  like  ©  and  O,  H  and 
N,  AA  and  M  were,  after  all,  very  easy  to  confuse  in  the  uncial 
hand ;  and  when  the  original  was  half  faded,  or  perhaps  even 
injured  in  parts,  the  scribe  could  not  always  avoid  making 
mistakes   even   by   the   closest   scrutiny.      The   %&>/CHS   Qsov 
instead   of   %^m  dsov  in  Heb.    ii.  9,  may  be  due  to  such 
an  error  in  reading.     We  seldom  find  one  line  transposed  for 
another,  but  very  frequently  one  line,  or  even  part  of  a  line, 
altogether  omitted,  more  especially  when  the  similar  ending 
of  two  lines  caused  the  eye  to  stray  from  the  second  to  the 
first   or   from   the   upper   to   the   lower.      This    is    termed 
'  homoioteleuta,'   and   its   correlative   is  '  dittography  ' — the 
writing   of  the   same   word   or   portion  of  a  sentence  twice 


§51.]        MATERIAL    II1STOIIY    OF    TIIK    TKXT    TO    >'.     ir,<)0        591 

over,  which  is  a  still  plainer  sign  of  inattention.  Strictly 
speaking,  we  ought  not  to  count  as  alterations  a  class  of 
variants  which  have  yet  had  just  the  same  effect  —  the  differ- 
ences produced  between  the  manuscripts  on  the  introduction 
of  word-division,  accentuation  (including  breathings)  and 
punctuation  —  though  indeed  the  copyist  was  usually  guided 
by  the  traditions  of  an  older  exegesis.  The  word  eicreKOwv, 
for  instance,  admits  the  reading  &ls  e\0a>v  quite  as  well  as 
sl(rs\6a)v  ;  avrcov  might  equally  well  be  understood  as 
or  as  avTwv1;  in  1.  Thess.  iii.  3  Lachmann  read  TO 
acrdivsaOai,,  others  TO  /ArjSeva  o-aiv£<j6ai  ;  and  the  two  conclud- 
ing words  of  John  i.  8  have  quite  as  often  been  held  to  be  the 
subject  of  the  first  clause  of  the  fourth  verse,  as  to  be  the 
nearer  definition  of  the  preceding  '  not  anything.' 

From  the  very  first  the  copyists  bestowed  but  the  smallest 
attention  on  the  orthographical,  dialectical  and  other  similar 
peculiarities  of  their  texts.  They  did  not  go  so  far  as  to 
remodel  their  originals  systematically  according  to  their  own 
handwriting,  pronunciation  and  idiom,  but  they  took  no  pains 
to  keep  them  free  from  such  influences  ;  and  the  result  was 
an  extraordinary  confusion  of  forms.  Attic  correctness  may 
be  found  side  by  side  with  utter  barbarism  —  how  hopeless, 
then,  the  task  of  discovering  the  forms  of  the  original  draft  ! 
It  was  but  rarely,  however,  that  the  meaning  of  the  text 
suffered  injury  from  this  carelessness,  and  even  the  strangest 
deformities  may  acquire  great  value  in  the  eyes  of  the 
etymologist  and  the  palaeographer.  Consistency  in  such 
things  as  the  placing  of  the  apostrophe,  the  use  of  the  vv 
sfaXKvaTifcov,  the  doubling  of  p  after  the  augment  *  or  the 
assimilation  of  consonants  in  compound  words/'  is  not  to  be 
expected  ;  we  find  ^fivpva  preserved  beside  a/jLi/pva,  TTSIV 
beside  TTISLV,  <y£vvr}Qr}vai  beside  <y£vr)6rjvcu,  ij/ATjv  beside  rjv, 
sfyOaaev  beside  styda/csv,  CLTTOKTEVVSI  beside  aTroKTslvsi,  o(f>s\ov 
beside  a)(j)s\ov,  rjvsca^d^crav  beside  avsw^O^a-av^  avoi^wa-t, 
beside  avoLdwcn,  oi&v  beside  avsw^sv,  ^voi^^vovs  beside 


1  E.g.,  2.  Cor.  iii.  5. 

2  E.g.,  2.  Cor.  xi.  25,  epa/35i<r0r/j/  and  eppa?5. 

3  E.g.,  2.  Cor.  iii.  1  :  ffwa-TariKcav  and  (rvvrariKuv,  or  iii.  2  and  3  :  fvyeypa.mj.fvT) 
and 


592      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 
OLKoSo/uow    beside    u/coSo/jiovv,1    till    at    last    i 


remains  doubtful  in  very  many  cases  whether  such  vulgarisms 
(including  errors  of  syntax  like  ^77  TTOTS  KaraTrarrjor  o  v  viv  for 
-<r  ay  cr  L  v.  Matt.  vii.  6)  should  be  put  down  to  the  author  or  the 
copyist.  In  the  reporting  of  proper  names,  correctness  is  still 
less  to  be  hoped  for  ;  in  the  same  verse  of  the  Acts  2  the 
different  texts  have  Po//.<£ai>,  Po/z<£a,  Ps/uffrap,  and  Ps<j>av,  while 
^LoKojAwvos  alternates  with  ^oXo/Aw^Tos*  and  'Acra^>  with  'Acra 
—  in  fact  in  these  cases  the  scribe  simply  gave  the  reins  to 
his  own  proclivities. 

A  special  feature  of  the  late  and  decadent  Greek  was  the 
truncation  of  diphthongs  and  vowels,  termed  in  some  cases 
'  Itacism.'  Scarcely  any  distinction  came  to  be  made  in 
the  pronunciation  of  co  and  o,  v  and  01,  and  after  a  time 
none  at  all  between  the  latter  and  i,  et,  and  rj  ;  at,  and  s  also 
became  interchangeable,  and  closely  resembled  77.  In  conse- 
quence of  this,  scribes  of  inferior  culture  were  obliged  to 
concoct  the  strangest  mixtures  of  vowels,  unless  they  pain- 
fully set  themselves  to  copy  their  model  letter  for  letter. 
Thus  we  find  crwcrov  for  artocrwv,  Tripa^srai,  for  Trsipa^sTS, 
7rpo<TK\7j(7Lv  for  irpoG'K\iaiv,  air  si,  for  STL,  rpsis  for  rpts. 
fcatvo8oj;iav  for  /ceifoSo^aVy  si,  /JLTJ  for  77  /z??,  vpsis  for  rjfjisis  and 
vice  versa  —  all  of  them  proofs  that  although  at  first  these 
errors  were  merely  orthographical,  they  often  led  to  serious 
injury  to  the  meaning.  Even  the  evv%ev  of  John  xix.  34 
could  be  read  by  Latin  translators  as  r}voi%svy  and  the  critics 
are  not  unanimous  to  this  day  as  to  whether,  in  Rom.  v.  1, 
the  preference  should  be  given  to  the  Indicative  s^ofjisv  or 
the  Subjunctive  s^mfisv  —  a  question  full  of  importance  for 
the  determination  of  the  Apostle's  frame  of  mind  at  that 
time. 

The  boundary  between  the  intentional  and  the  unin- 
tentional alterations  cannot  be  sharply  defined  ;  many  a 
thoughtful  copyist,  taking  into  consideration  the  'Itacism' 
with  which  he  was  familiar,  would  certainly  correct  his 
model  with  the  full  intention  of  so  doing,  changing  an  Infini- 
tive Middle  into  a  second  person  plural  and  so  on  ;  on 
the  other  hand,  some  of  the  corruptions  of  the  text,  to  be 

1  Luke  xvii.  28.  2  Acts  vii.  43. 


§51.]        MATERIAL    HISTORY    OP   THK    TKXT   TO    C.    1500        503 

discussed  later,  arise  from  the  fact  that  in  the  memory 
of  the  scribe,  what  he  had  just  read  became  confused  with 
things  he  had  learnt  in  former  days.  Moreover,  even  very 
serious  corruptions  might  simply  arise  by  chance — when, 
for  instance,  a  marginal  note  which  the  author  himself  had 
added  as  a  supplement  to  his  text,  was  inserted  in  the  wrong 
place  by  a  careless  scribe ;  or  when  marginal  notes  in- 
serted by  a  former  owner  as  glosses,  were  then  considered 
to  be  parts  of  the  text  and  interpolated  in  the  original— 
in  favourable  cases  at  the  right  place,  but  by  no  means 
always. 

3.  But  in  the  case  of  the  New  Testament  text  in  par- 
ticular, it  is  the  intentional  alterations  which  have  such  very 
great  importance — those,  namely,  which  were  undertaken  with 
the  intention  of  improving  it  and  of  removing  difficulties,  but 
are  not  really  based  on  a  better  text,  and  follow  only  the  indi- 
vidual taste  of  the  scribe.  In  my  opinion  it  is  not  advisable  to 
make  an  express  distinction  between  these  and  *  falsifications,' 
since,  according  to  the  present  standard,  all  arbitrary  emenda- 
tions of  the  text  must  be  called  *  falsifications,'  though  even 
the  boldest  '  emendators  '  of  the  early  times  acted  in  all  good 
faith,  believing  that  what  they  did  was  in  the  interests  of  the 
Word  of  God.  It  is  true  that  the  orthodox  ecclesiastical 
teachers  are  very  fond  of  reproaching  the  heretics  with 
having  '  falsified '  l  the  Bible  text  in  favour  of  their  own  false 
teaching.  Marcion  gave  some  ground  for  this  reproach  by  his 
treatment  of  the  Gospels  and  the  Pauline  Epistles  ;  but  the 
same  accusation  is  brought  against  the  other  Gnostics,  as  it 
was  once  brought  against  the  Jews ;  Valentinians  first  and 
foremost,  but  also  Artemonites,  Novatians,  Arians,  Donatists, 
and  even  Nestorians,  are  all  included  in  the  charge.  Even 
within  the  Church  one  party  attributes  such  action  to  the 
other :  Ambrosiaster,2  for  instance,  believes  that  where  the 
Greek  manuscripts  differed  on  any  important  point  from  the 
Latin,  the  Greeks  with  their  presumptuous  frivolity  had 
smuggled  in  the  corrupt  reading.  It  was,  of  course,  con- 
venient to  ascribe  the  fact  of  any  great  uncertainty  of  the 

1  irapaxapdcro-eiv,  paSiovpyew,  irterpolare,  adulterate,  violare  etc. 

2  See  p.  537. 

QQ 


594      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

text  to  the  agency  of  the  Devil ;  but  we  are  very  frequently 
in  a  position  to  prove  the  injustice  of  the  reproach,  for  the 
falsifications  attributed  to  the  Nestorians  or  the  Donatists 
can  often  be  shown  to  have  been  variants  long  before  their 
time.  Marcion  has  actually  preserved  the  correct  text 
(oh  ovSs)  in  Gal.  ii.  5,  while  Tertullian,  who  attacks  him 
mercilessly  for  having  interpolated  the  two  words,  is  in 
reality  the  champion  of  a  '  corrected '  text.  Perhaps  the 
originator  of  this  correction  thought  it  impossible,  in  view  of 
Acts  xvi.  3,  that  Paul  should  have  disturbed  the  peace  of  the 
Church  in  Jerusalem  by  his  self-willed  obstinacy  on  a  side 
issue,  and  accordingly  reformed  the  text  in  such  a  manner  as, 
in  his  opinion,  it  must  have  run  originally.  From  this  na'ive 
conviction  that  what  was  dogmatically  objectionable  or  incon- 
venient could  not  have  had  a  place  in  Scripture,  and  must 
therefore  be  removed,  spring  innumerable  important  variants, 
particularly  from  the  earlier  times,  for  later  on  it  became  the 
custom  to  explain  such  difficulties  by  exegesis.  Dogma  alone 
is  responsible  for  such  variants  as  the  following :  John  i.  18, 
where,  *  The  only  begotten  God '  is  as  well  attested  as 
'  The  only  begotten  Son  ' ;  Matt.  i.  25,  where  '  her  son '  is 
just  as  authentic  as  '  her  first-born  son,'  or  Luke  iii.  22, 
where  in  the  account  of  the  Baptism  the  voice  from  heaven 
is  rendered  by  one  set  of  texts  as  '  This  day  have  I  begotten 
thee,'  and  in  another  and  afterwards  undisputed  version  as 
'  In  thee  I  am  well  pleased.'  And  when  the  ovtc  avafiatva)  of 
John  vii.  8,  which  appears  to  be  an  obvious  impossibility,  is 
corrected  by  the  substitution  of  OVTTCO  avapaivw,  or  when  the 
words  '  All  that  came  before  me  '  of  John  x.  8,  so  very  welcome 
as  they  were  to  heretics,  are  made  innocuous  in  two  different 
ways,  the  intention  of  the  emendator  is  quite  as  unmistakable 
as  is  his  confident  belief  that  so  questionable  a  word  could 
only  have  found  its  way  into  the  Bible  through  the  error 
or  the  intentional  falsification  of  a  scribe. 

But  yet  another  motive  for  intentional  alteration  of  the 
text  is  sometimes  mentioned  by  ecclesiastical  writers.  Origen, 
not  without  reason,  moralises  on  the  right  of  solecisms  to 
exist  within  the  Scriptures,  and  complains  of  the  copyists 
who,  TrpoQdo-si  SiopQaio-sus—'  on  the  pretext  of  making  a 


§  51.]       MATERIAL    HISTORY    OF   THE   TEXT   TO   C.    1500        505 

thorough  correction  ' — altered  the  texts  to  suit  their  own 
ideas  of  style  and  logic.  Andrew  of  Csesarea,1  in  his  Com- 
mentary on  the  Apocalypse,  expressly  extends  the  curse  in 
Rev.  xx.  18  fol.  to  the  forgers  who  considered  that  Attic 
syntax  and  a  strictly  logical  train  of  thought  were  more 
convincing  and  more  to  he  admired  than  the  peculiarities  of 
the  Scripture  language.  What  the  Fathers  meant  by  this  is 
made  clear  by  an  anecdote  told  by  Sozomenos 2 :  —At  an 
assembly  of  Cypriot  bishops  about  the  year  850,  one  Tri- 
phyllios  of  Ledra,  a  man  of  high  culture,  was  addressing  the 
company,  and  in  the  saying  '  take  up  thy  bed  a%nd  walk ' :' 
made  use  of  the  more  refined  Attic  O-KL^TTOVS  instead  of  the 
New  Testament  /cpd^aros ;  whereupon  a  certain  Bishop 
Spyridon  sprang  up  and  angrily  called  to  him  before  the 
whole  assembly :  '  Are  you,  then,  better  than  he  who  first 
said  /cpd/3aTo$[\]  that  you  are  ashamed  to  use  his  word?' 
Again,  Tatian  tells  us  that  he  went  through  the  text  of  the 
Pauline  Epistles  in  order  to  remove  the  barbarisms  and  vul- 
garisms it  contained,4  and  countless  scribes,  with  less  system 
than  he,  and  therefore  all  the  greater  danger,  copied  their 
originals  with  more  regard  for  elegance  than  accuracy  :  /caroi- 
KOVVTSS  sis  ' \spovaa\ijiJL  is  changed  into  sv  'lepovtr.* ;  the  un- 
usual SnrTTopovvTo  of  Acts  ii.  12  into  SiTjiropow  ;  and  if  the 
Syrians  read  rjtcovo-Or)  rj  d/cor']  in  Matt.  iv.  24,  while  all  the 
other  evidence  is  in  favour  of  air-  or  s%-rj\6ev  rj  d/corf,  the 
latter  might  very  well  be  a  correction  ;  just  as  Lucian  mocked 
at  a  KO\\SI  Ka\\Lcrrr],  SO  rj/cova-Orj  rj  d/coij  might  also  have 
appeared  clumsy. 

The  Apocalypse,  with  its  Semitisms,  was  the  book  that 
afforded  the  greatest  temptations  to  the  emendator  :  of  course  a 
grammatical  error  like  dpviov  EO-T^KWS  .  .  .  sxwv  was  corrected 
to  s<TT7)Kos  .  .  .  e%oi/,  or  sirra  irvsvfiara  .  .  .  air8<rra\fjuv o  i 
to  dirso-raX/jLsv a,  or  pofj.$aia  rfj  s^s\0o very  sic  rov  crToaaros 
to  TV  sKTTopevo/AEVT}.  And  it  was  not  only  for  the  sake 
of  elegance  of  style  that  these  things  were  done,  but  far 
more  often  with  the  intention  of  making  the  language 
clearer  and  more  intelligible.  The  '  facilitating '  variants, 

1  See  p.  540.  "  Hist.  Eccl.  i.  11.  s  John  v.  8. 

4  See  p.  495.  b  Acts  ii.  5. 

Q   Q   2 


596      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

especially  those  in  the  form  of  additions  to  the  text,  are 
Legion  in  the  New  Testament :  innumerable  avrov,  avr&v, 
scnlv,  sicriv  etc.  are  due  to  this  tendency,  as  well  as  words 
like  the  dsXwv  before  or  after  irida-ai  ps  in  2.  Cor.  xi.  32,  the 
6  '\T)orovs  after  CLKOVO-CLS  Bs  in  Matt.  iv.  12,  or  the  ra 
TrapaTTTai/jLara  avr&v  in  Matt.  vi.  15  a.  Many  of  the  above- 
mentioned  changes,  especially  of  conjunctions,  have  the  same 
origin  ;  where  a  yap  appeared  unsuitable  or  inappropriate 
according  to  the  strict  laws  of  logic,  it  was  replaced  by  a  Be 
or  an  ovv  ;  and  if  later  provincial  idioms  sometimes  found 
their  way  into  the  New  Testament  text,  it  is  scarcely  less 
probable  that  copyists  with  grammatical  culture  (such  as 
existed  in  considerable  numbers  not  only  as  late  as  the  fourth 
and  fifth  centuries)  took  great  pains  to  polish  the  text  accord- 
ing to  the  laws  of  the  Schools,  and  altogether  to  make  it  more 
agreeable  to  read.  In  the  Sinaiticus,  for  instance,  the 
inconvenient  'lovBaioi  of  Acts  ii.  5,  is  simply  omitted,  and 
the  Gospels  too,  as  well  as  the  Acts,  were  very  much  affected 
by  this  sort  of  emendation. 

And  indeed  in  their  case  it  was  the  assimilation,  re- 
modelling, amplification  and  transposition  of  the  text  of  one 
Evangelist  to  suit  the  parallel  reports  of  another,  that  produced 
so  many  thousands  of  variants.  These  changes  occur  so  sys- 
tematically that  we  cannot  be  satisfied  with  the  hypothesis — 
which  would  cover  individual  cases — that  the  memory  of  the 
scribe  was  unconsciously  influenced  by  the  similar  passages 
he  had  read  elsewhere.  This  evil  habit,  moreover,  is  not 
limited  to  the  Gospels  alone ;  for  instance,  the  s/c  between 
TrpcoroTOKos  and  r&v  vstcp&v  comes  from  Col.  i.  18,  and  an 
interesting  transmutation  has  taken  place  between  Kev. 
i.  8,  xxi.  6,  and  xxii.  13  ;  the  words  *  upon  the  sons  of  dis- 
obedience '  in  Col.  iii.  6  have  found  their  way  in  from 
Eph.  v.  6,  and  Gal.  vi.  15  has  been  variously  remodelled  on 
verse  v.  6.  There  is  all  too  great  a  tendency  to  rectify  the 
Old  Testament  quotations,  which  are  often  free  enough 
in  the  New,  according  to  the  current  Septuagint  text.  But 
the  parallel  accounts  of  the  Gospels  offer  the  most  tempting 
field  for  this  equalising  process ;  and  since  it  is  notorious 
that  the  later  Evangelists  themselves  introduced  passages 


§61.]       MATERIAL    HISTORY   OF   THE   TEXT   TO   C.    1500        597 

from  the  earlier,  it  is  often  impossible,  considering  the  amount 
of  confusion  among  the  manuscripts,  to  distinguish  the 
original  uniformity  of  text  from  that  which  was  produced 
later,  by  artificial  means.  Thus  the  words  in  John  xix.  20, 
'  it  was  written  in  Hebrew,  and  in  Latin,  and  in  Greek,' 
have  intruded  into  Luke  xxiii.  88  ;  most  manuscripts  insert 
a  whole  verse — Matt.  vi.  15 — after  Mark  xi.  25,  merely 
because  this  verse  of  Mark's  corresponded  with  Matt.  vi.  14  ; 
others,  again,  have  inserted  Matt.  vii.  7  and  8  instead. 
Matt.  xx.  7  was  augmented  from  verse  4  by  the  words 
'  And  whatsoever  is  right  I  will  give  you.'  A  desire  for 
amplification  and  the  rounding  off  of  phrases  is  related  to 
the  above ;  many  a  copyist  finds  it  hard  to  let  *  the  chief 
priests  ' l  pass  without  '  the  scribes  ' ;  eating  without  drink- 
ing 2 ;  praying 3  without  fasting.  The  liturgical  language  also 
exercised  a  certain  influence,  and  not  in  the  doxologies  of  the 
Epistles  alone.  The  most  famous  instance  is  the  introduc- 
tion of  the  conclusion  after  the  Lord's  prayer  in  Matt.  vi.  13  ; 
but  the  words  '  In  the  name  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ '  after 
the  '  Tabitha,  arise '  of  Acts  ix.  40  (of  which  we  have  very 
early  evidence)  have  a  precisely  similar  ring. 

Individual  instances  of  such  conformatory  addition  may 
have  crept  in  accidentally  from  the  margins,  as  when  in 
Acts  i.  3  we  find  the  word  ^>aivo^svos  standing  beside  (or 
before)  oTrravo/juevos  in  the  text;  they  were  intended  in  the 
first  place  to  assist  in  the  elucidation  of  the  text,  not  to  make 
it  more  correct.  But  the  copyist  who  included  them  in  the 
text  imagined  that  he  was  improving  it,  as  was  certainly  the 
case  with  the  man  who  in  1.  Cor.  vii.  3,  replaced  o$>st\r]  by 
svvoia,  or  avoia  by  Sidvoia  in  2.  Tim.  iii.  9,  or 
by  fjLiorOaTroSoaLa,  in  Col.  iii.  24. 

It  is  impossible  for  us  to  guess  the  object  of  the  '  corrector  ' 
in  every  case  in  which  the  variants  were  certainly  intentional ; 
a  classification  of  the  motives  for  '  emendation  '  would  be  a 
'hopeless  task.  The  fact  itself  is  incontestable  that  for  cen- 
turies the  sacred  text  was  handled  in  the  most  incredibly 
arbitrary  manner,  even  though  this  tendency  certainly 
decreased  from  one  generation  to  another.  If  anything  was 

1  E.g.,  Matt.  xxvi.  3.  2  E.g.,  Matt.  vi.  25.  3  1.  Cor.  vii.  5. 


598      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

felt  to  be  lacking  in  a  given  text  the  gap  was  filled  without 
any  hesitation ;  Matt.  xxii.  14,  for  instance,  is  reinserted  after 
xx.  15,  in  order  to  silence  the  malcontents  still  more  effectually, 
and  the  Apostolic  Decree  of  the  Acts  is  raised  to  the  dignity  of 
a  moral  code  by  the  addition  of  the  fundamental  principle  : 
*  Do  not  unto  others  what  thou  wouldst  not  that  men  should 
do  unto  thee.'  And  in  the  First  Epistle  of  John,  v.  7  and  8, 
the  words  intended  to  support  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity,  '  For 
there  are  three  that  bear  record  in  heaven,  the  Father,  the 
Word,  and  the  Holy  Ghost,  and  these  three  are  one,'  have  not 
even  yet  disappeared  from  most  versions  of  the  Bible.  This 
interpolation,  which  is  found  over  and  over  again  in  the  Latin 
Church  of  Spain  and  Africa  after  the  fourth  century,  crept 
into  the  Vulgate,  and,  at  the  end  of  the  Middle  Ages,  even 
into  a  few  Greek  manuscripts.  The  author  of  this  *  Comma 
Johanneum '  had  no  more  intention  of  deceiving  than  the  scribe 
who  inserted  '  And  they  worshipped  him '  in  Luke  xxiv.  52, 
or  '  And  was  carried  up  into  heaven  '  in  xxiv.  51.  The  only 
difference  lies  in  the  fact  that  the  latter  was  a  Greek  and  the 
former  a  Latin.  It  is  quite  possible  that  we  still  have  many 
Greek  '  Commata  '  of  the  same  age  even  in  our  best  editions. 
It  was  very  natural  that  many  learned  Fathers,  from 
Origen  onwards,  should  have  laboured  to  stem  the  increasing 
corruption  of  the  New  Testament  text,  and  should  have 
corrected  their  own  copies  throughout  after  better  and  older 
manuscripts,  thereby  exerting  an  influence  on  others  also 
towards  the  use  of  better  and  earlier  readings  in  the  pre- 
paration of  new  codices.  But  the  result  was  a  still  more 
hopeless  confusion,  since  no  really  sound  critical  principles 
existed.  Even  Origen,  whose  texts  were  regarded  as  standards 
by  his  own  disciples  and  by  a  large  part  of  the  learned 
Greek  world,  did  not  by  any  means  confine  himself  to  re- 
moving the  errors  of  others,  but  also  introduced  some  of  his 
own  making ;  in  fact,  his  authority  helped  a  considerable 
number  of  undoubtedly  false  readings  to  a  position  of  universal 
acceptance.  In  the  '  Decretum  Gelasii ' 1  the  Gospels  of 
Lucian  and  Hesychius  are  rejected  as  falsified  texts.  This 
cautious  proceeding  is  due  to  Jerome,  who,  in  his  preface 

1  See  above,  p.  504. 


§  52.]  THE   WITNESSES   TO    THE   TEXTS   OF  TO-DAY          599 

to  the  Four  Gospels  '  Ad  Damasum,'  speaks  contemptuously 
of  the  Gospel  manuscripts  issued  under  the  names  of  these 
men,  and  preferred  by  a  few  perverse  persons ;  his  words 
sound  as  though  they  had  contained  an  unusually  large 
number  of  interpolations.  Now  the  successful  labours  of 
these  two  theologians  l  on  the  Old  Testament  text  are  well 
known ;  it  is  not  incredible,  then,  that  they  should  have 
undertaken  a  systematic  emendation  of  the  Gospels  at  least ; 
but  this  is  not  rendered  certain  by  such  a  statement  as 
the  above  from  Jerome,  and  still  less  would  his  judgment 
be  binding  on  us.  We  can  at  present  have  no  idea  of  what 
the  text  of  Lucian's  Gospel  was  like. 

The  fact  that  during  this  period  of  its  development  the  New 
Testament  text  was  overgrown  to  an  amazing  extent  can  only 
be  denied  by  the  ignorant.  It  places  the  party  of  dogma, 
however,  in  an  embarrassing  situation,  because  the  deteriora- 
tions produced  within  the  Church  are  treated  by  them  with  the 
same  reverence  as  the  genuine  text.  Fortunately  for  science, 
the  earliest  witnesses  to  its  corruption  are  also  in  every  instance 
witnesses  against  one  another,  so  that  as  we  possess  them 
in  enormous  quantities,  they  help  us  not  only  to  survey  the 
different  stages  of  corruption,  but  to  trace  back  the  original  until 
we  arrive  within  measurable  distance  of  its  starting-point. 

§  52.  The  Witnesses  to  the  Texts  down  to  1500  A.D.,  as  they 

exist  to-day 

1.  The  first  place  must  here  be  given  to  the  quotations 
from  the  New  Testament  in  the  works  of  ecclesiastical  writers , 
because  some  of  these  have  the  advantage  of  a  higher  antiquity 
than  any  of  the  preserved  manuscripts,  and  in  their  case  we 
may  generally  be  certain  to  what  part  of  the  world  the  quoted 
texts  belonged.  Now,  the  writings  of  the  Fathers  from  the  third 
century  onwards  are  extremely  rich  in  such  quotations,  and 
naturally  we  need  only  take  the  Latin  Fathers  into  considera- 
tion as  witnesses  for  the  Latin  text,  the  Syrian  for  the  Syriac, 
and  so  on.  Unhappily,  the  great  work  of  throwing  light 
upon  this  class  of  evidence  is  hardly  begun.  The  '  Catenae  '- 
Commentaries  patched  together  from  the  utterances  of  earlier 

1  They  lived  about  300. 


600      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP,  n 

Fathers,  and  usually  written  all  over  the  margins  bordering 
the  Bible  texts — seem  once  more,  we  are  glad  to  say,  to  be 
attracting  the  earnest  attention  of  modern  theologians ;  but 
the  greater  part  of  them  have  not  yet  been  edited  at  all,  and  the 
Patristic  texts  themselves  but  unsatisfactorily,  while  the  actual 
words  of  the  Bible  quotations  are  often  the  most  untrustworthy 
part  about  them.  Thus  it  is  only  in  a  few  instances  l  that  an 
exhaustive  collection  of  this  material  and  a  critical  study  of  it 
have  been  attempted.  The  greatest  caution  is  necessary  for 
this  task  :  allusions  to  a  Scripture  sentence  must  of  course 
be  judged  differently  from  direct  quotation  ;  but  even  with 
the  latter,  the  words  are  often  given  simply  from  memory,  and 
are  then  never  to  be  trusted  on  individual  points  of  expression. 
We  may  assume  that  an  ecclesiastical  writer  would  scarcely 
have  looked  up  short  and  well-known  Sayings  in  his  Bible 
before  making  use  of  them.  If  the  same  author  quotes 
a  "passage  very  frequently,  and  always  in  exactly  the  same 
words,  we  may  take  it  that  his  memory  is  clinging  to  a 
written  source.  When  the  quotation  is  very  long,2  the  idea 
of  its  repetition  from  memory  is  out  of  the  question,  and  we 
may  draw  the  same  conclusion  when  we  are  given  minute 
information  as  to  the  place  where  the  quotation  is  to  be 
found.  Books  of  Logia,  such  as  Cyprian's  *  Testimonia  '  and 
Augustine's  *  Speculum,'  are  of  the  highest  value  for  textual 
criticism,  inasmuch  as  they  were  doubtless  put  together  from 
Bible  manuscripts.  The  same  is  true  of  Commentaries  which 
give  portions  of  the  text  one  after  another  before  they  explain 
them.  Many  traditional  errors  in  the  Text  can  be  rectified 
by  means  of  the  commentary,  because  we  can  there  see  what 
was  the  form  of  the  Text  which  the  commentator  was  using.3 
But  the  evidence  of  a  '  Father '  reaches  its  highest  value 
when  he  actually  refers  to  some  peculiarity  in  the  wording, 
or  when  he  compares  different  readings  one  with  another. 

But  even  in  cases  where  the  author  has  neither  quoted 
accurately,  nor  is  the  condition  in  which  his  words  have  come 
down  to  us  above  suspicion,  the  context  will  sometimes  enable 

1  E.g.,  with  Justin,  Clement  of  Alexandria  and  Tertullian. 
a  E.g.,  Matt.  xxiv.  4b-31  in  Cyprian's  Ad  Fortun.  11. 

3  Thus  Origen  and  Chrysostom  among  the  Greeks,  Ambrosiaster  and  Jerome 
in  the  West,  Ephraim  among  the  Syrians. 


§62.]          THE    WITNESSES   TO    THE    TEXTS    OF    TO-DAY  601 

us  to  decide  with  some  certainty  to  which  of  two  or  three 
variant  readings  the  writer  gave  his  preference— e.g.  whether 
in  Gal.  ii.  5  he  read  '  To  whom  we  gave  place  for  the 
moment,'  or  '  To  whom  we  gave  place,  no,  not  for  an  hour.' ' 
The  very  great  value  of  the  Catenae  consists  chiefly  in  the  fact 
that  they  alone  have  preserved  a  number  of  fragments,  from 
a  literature  otherwise  lost  beyond  recall,  which  offer  excellent 
materials  for  the  determination  of  the  time  and  provenance  of 
interesting  variants.  It  stands  to  reason  that  in  this  respect 
the  writings  of  heretics  and  schismatics  are  quite  as  valuable 
to  us  as  those  of  the  most  orthodox  Fathers,  and  that  the 
work  of  the  inexperienced  blunderer  ranks  with  that  of 
the  eloquent  master  of  ideas.  Even  inaccurate  translations, 
like  those  of  Irenteus  and  Origen  into  Latin,  may  acquire 
special  importance,  since  the  translator,  free  as  he  is  in  his 
rendering  of  the  quotations,  shows  us  nevertheless  how  he 
read  the  passages  in  question  in  his  Bible.  Very  often  this 
is  also  the  case  with  variants  in  inferior  manuscripts ;  in 
Codices  W  and  A,  for  instance,  of  Cyprian's  '  Testimonia,' 
the  original  text  (which  is  only  retained  uncorrupted  in  L) 
has  been  arbitrarily  remodelled,  but  in  accordance  with  the 
copyists'  own  versions  of  the  Bible  ;  thus  the  different  copyists 
of  Cyprian  become  witnesses  to  certain  forms  of  the  Latin 
translation  which  would  otherwise  have  sunk  into  oblivion. 

2.  The  systematic  study  of  the  second  order  of  records,  the 
Greek  manuscripts  of  the  New  Testament  Books,  has  been 
carried  much  further.  These  are  divided  according  to  the 
form  of  writing  into  the  Uncial  and  Minuscule  texts,  but 
since  few  of  the  latter  are  earlier  than  the  tenth  century,  their 
authority  cannot  rival  that  of  the  Uncial,  for  as  a  rule  a 
manuscript  is  the  more  valuable  the  older  it  is.  This  rule, 
however,  has  its  exceptions.  A  Minuscule  manuscript  of  the 
twelfth  century  may  have  been  copied  with  care  and  accuracy 
from  a  very  old  and  good  original,  and  similarly  an  Uncial 
manuscript  of  the  seventh  may  have  been  carelessly  copied 
from  an  indifferent  original  prepared  five  years  before  ;  in 
this  case  no  one  would  prefer  the  latter.  Thus  the  Ferrar 
group  of  Minuscule  Gospel  texts  (so  called  because  they  were 

1  See  above,  p.  594. 


602      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

discovered  by  the  Irish  critic,  Ferrar)  contain  a  larger  amount 
of  peculiar  matter  than  would  a  whole  series  of  Majuscule  MSS. 
put  together.  Unfortunately,  the  age  of  a  manuscript  cannot 
generally  be  determined  even  approximately  without  the  help 
of  the  palaeographer  ;  before  the  eighth  century  the  Greeks  did 
not  insert  the  date  of  composition  in  their  manuscripts,  nor 
can  we  tell  anything  of  their  places  of  origin.  Among  the  old 
codices  some  are  bilingual — Graeco-Latin,  Graeco-Coptic,  or 
Graeco-Sahidic— and  in  that  case  the  translation  stands  either 
between  the  lines  of  the  Greek  text  or  in  separate  columns 
beside  it.  The  more  important  manuscripts,  many  of  which 
are  now  denoted  in  the  great  libraries  by  very  elaborate 
symbols,  have  been  given  shorter  names  since  the  rise  of  textual 
criticism :  e.g.  *  Vaticanus,'  from  its  present  place  of  abode ; 
'  Alexandrinus,'  to  record  the  fact  that  it  was  conveyed  to 
England  from  Alexandria  by  the  help  of  Cyrillus  Lucaris; 
1  Codex  Ephraemi  Syri  rescriptus,'  because  there  the  Bible 
text  lay  hidden  under  that  of  the  homilies  of  Ephraim  ;  and 
so  on.  Still  simpler  is  the  system  introduced  by  J.  J. 
Wettstein,  of  designating  the  Greek  Majuscule  codices  by 
means  of  Latin  capital  letters,  and,  when  these  did  not 
suffice,  by  Greek  and  even  Hebrew  capitals:  e.g.  A,  2,  4>,  etc. ; 
x  and  3  ;  the  Greek  Minuscules  by  Arabic  numerals,  and  the 
manuscripts  of  the  old  Latin  translation  by  small  Latin  letters. 
The  only  drawback  to  this  system  is  that,  owing  to  the 
incompleteness  of  the  manuscripts,  the  same  sign  is  made  use 
of  for  several  texts  of  very  different  ages  and  values  ;  thus  B, 
for  instance,  in  the  case  of  the  Gospels  and  Epistles,  stands 
for  a  manuscript  of  the  fourth  century,  and  in  that  of  the 
Apocalypse  for  one  of  the  end  of  the  eighth  ;  H ,  f or  the 
Gospels,  indicates  an  almost  worthless  MS.  of  about  900, 
for  the  Acts,  a  mutilated  ninth  century  codex,  and  for  Paul  a 
very  good  MS.  of  about  500.  The  case  is  still  worse  with  the 
Minuscule  texts.  Here  each  of  the  four  principal  parts  of  the 
New  Testament — the  Gospels,  the  Acts  and  Catholic  Epistles, 
the  Pauline  Epistles  and  the  Apocalypse  —  is  numbered  from 
1  upwards  (the  Gospels  reach  1273  even  in  Gregory  and 
Tischendorf 's '  Novum  Testamentum  Graece ') ;  so  that  the  same 
number,  say  12,  indicates  quite  different  manuscripts  accord- 


§  62.]          THE   WITNESSES   TO   THE   TEXTS   OF   TO-DAY          603 

ing  as  it  is  a  question  of  the  Gospels,  the  Acts,  the  Pauline 
Epistles,  or  the  Apocalypse — and  even  two  different  lectiona- 
ries,  one  of  the  Gospels  and  one  of  the  Epistles,  bear  this 
number !  On  the  other  hand,  one  and  the  same  MS.  bears 
a  different  number  for  each  different  part  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment :  a  '  Florentinus '  of  1381,  for  instance,  bears  the 
number  367  for  the  Gospels,  146  for  the  Acts,  182  for  the 
Pauline  Epistles,  and  23  for  the  Apocalypse  !  And  in  addition 
to  this  the  English,  following  Scrivener,  have  a  system  of 
numeration  differing  in  many  ways  from  the  German,  which 
follows  Gregory.  Thus  it  may  be  seen  that  considerable 
patience  and  attention  are  required  in  order  to  estimate 
correctly  all  the  different  witnesses  referred  to  in  editions 
of  the  Texts,  in  Commentaries  and  in  critical  investiga- 
tions. It  must  especially  be  borne  in  mind  that  several 
of  the  very  best  manuscripts  have  been  preserved  to  us 
in  very  incomplete  form  ;  that  the  more  comprehensive  of 
them  may  have  been  copied  from  various  different  originals, 
so  that  some  parts  of  them  may  be  of  greater  value  than 
others,  and  that  one  and  the  same  scribe— where  the  work 
is  not  shared  between  several  —  sometimes  appears  as  though 
tired  out,  and  makes  mistakes  which  never  occur  in  other 
parts  of  his  work.  Valuable  manuscripts  have  sometimes 
undergone  two,  three  or  even  more  wholesale  corrections, 
but  the  corrections  by  no  means  always  offer  the  best 
readings.  (The  work  of  the  correctors  is  generally  indi- 
cated in  its  chronological  order  by  the  addition  of  small 
letters,  Arabic  numerals,  or  asterisks,  to  the  principal  letters, 
e.g.  Ka,  Kb,  H1,  D**,  etc.) 

Only  two  of  the  more  important  New  Testament  manuscripts 
appear  to  belong  to  the  fourth  century  :  the  '  Sinaiticus '  and  the 
'  Vaticanus,'  both  containing  the  whole  Bible. 

X  (Sinaiticus).  Discovered  in  the  Monastery  of  St.  Catherine  on 
Mount  Sinai  by  C.  von  Tischendorf  in  1844 :  published  in  1862 ;  now 
in  St.  Petersburg.  This  is  the  only  Uncial  MS.  which  contains 
the  complete  New  Testament,  even  including  the  Epistle  of 
Barnabas  and  the  '  Shepherd '  of  Hermas.  Even  if  it  belongs  to  the 
50  MSS.  prepared  by  Eusebius  for  Constantine,  and  the  same 
Egyptian  scribe  to  whom  we  owe  B  assisted  here  and  there  in  its 


604      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  11. 

production,  it  ought  not  to  be  estimated  at  so  high  a  value  as  its 
discoverer  is  inclined  to  claim  for  it. 

B  (Vaticanus).  An  Athanasian  Bible,  either  written  about 
331  (so  O.  von  Gebhardt)  or  soon  after  367  (A.  Kahlfs  l) ;  breaks  off 
at  verse  ix.  14  of  Hebrews,  while  a  few  leaves  are  also  lost  at 
the  beginning  and  in  the  middle.  Thus  part  of  Hebrews,  1.  and 
2.  Timothy,  Titus,  Philemon  and  the  Apocalypse  are  altogether 
wanting.  This  precious  possession  was  long  jealously  guarded  in 
the  Vatican  Library,  and  only  since  1867  have  we  become  tolerably 
familiar — again  through  Tischendorf — with  its  readings ;  a  photo- 
graphic impression  of  it  appeared  in  Eome  in  1889.  Its  original 
text,  which  can  still  be  easily  distinguished  in  spite  of  some  later 
retouching,  is  almost  universally  considered  excellent. 

A  (Alexandrinus).  Has  been  in  England  since  1628,  and  has 
there  been  frequently  collated.  In  1879  it  was  sumptuously  edited 
at  the  expense  of  the  British  Museum.  It  also  contains  the  whole 
Bible  ;  in  the  New  Testament  (which  includes  the  Apocalypse)  we 
also  find  the  First  and  Second  Epistles  of  Clement,  but  of  these 
the  last  pages  are  wanting,  as  well  as  the  whole  of  the  Psalms 
of  Solomon,  which  originally  formed  the  end.  The  bookbinder 
has  robbed  us  of  several  marginal  letters ;  and  the  larger  part  of 
Matthew,  part  of  John  and  of  2.  Corinthians  are  now  missing  from 
this  Codex.  A  belongs  to  the  second  half  of  the  fifth  century.  Its 
text  differs  very  much  in  the  different  books,  and  is  least  service- 
able in  the  Gospels. 

C  (Cod.  Ephraemi  Syri  rescriptus).  Now  in  the  Bibliotheque 
Nationale  of  Paris.  It  is  probably  as  old  as  A,  and  also  of 
Egyptian  origin.  It,  too,  was  a  complete  Bible,  though  little  of 
the  Old  Testament  is  now  preserved.  It  contains  rather  more 
than  half  of  the  New,  however,  but  in  fragments  scattered  over 
every  part  of  it.  It  is  difficult  to  read,  but  repays  the  trouble, 
for  it  contains  some  quite  original  readings. 

P  and  Q  ,  are  likewise  good  palimpsests,  and  consist  in  frag- 
ments of  the  Gospels  from  the  sixth  and  nfth  centuries.  They  are 
portions  of  the  Isidorus  Manuscript  of  Wolfenbiittel,  which 
also  contains  fragments  of  the  Gothic  translation. 

L.     A  Gospel  Codex,  dating  indeed  only  from  about  800,  and 
written  either  carelessly  or  else  by  a  scribe  entirely  ignorant  o 
Greek,  but  founded  nevertheless  upon  an  excellent  original.     I 
is  now  in  Paris. 

A.    Contains  the  four  Gospels,  almost  without  a  break.     It  was 
written  at  St.  Gall  in  the  ninth  century  from  an  original  containing 
1  Theologische  Liter aturzeitung  for  1899,  p.  556. 


' 


§52.]  TlllC    WITNKSSKS    To    T11K    TKXTS    OF    TO-DAY  ()()") 

many  peculiar  readings,  especially  in  Mark  ;  the  Latin  version 
runs  between  the  lines.  The  Codex  G  of  the  Pauline  Epistles 
(called  Boernerianus  from  its  former  owner,  a  Leipzig  Professor 
named  Borner,  who  flourished  about  1700),  which  is  also  bilingual, 
is  perhaps  by  the  same  hand,  or  was  at  any  rate  produced  in  the 
same  monastery  and  at  the  same  time.  From  this  again  F,  a 
ninth  century  Graeco- Latin  manuscript  produced  at  Eeichenau,  may 
have  been  copied,  at  least  as  far  as  the  Greek  version  is  concerned. 
Among  the  other  manuscripts  containing  only  the  Pauline 
Epistles,  Codex  H  (about  500)  must  be  reckoned  one  of  the  very 
best,  but  unfortunately  only  about  one-ninth  of  the  Epistles 
are  preserved,  and  even  these  are  scattered  between  St.  Peters- 
burg, Moscow,  Kiev,  Paris,  Turin  and  Mount  Athos.  We  may  also 
mention  the  somewhat  older  A  (containing  only  fragments  of 
1  Cor.  i.  vi.  and  vii.)  because  it  belongs  to  the  few  '  Papyracei ' 
which  we  still  possess. 

Among  the  manuscripts  containing  the  Acts  alone,  E  stands 
first.  It  is  called  Laudianus  after  Laud,  Archbishop  of  Canter- 
bury, who  presented  it  to  the  Bodleian  Library  at  Oxford.  It  is 
in  Greek  and  Latin,  and  was  produced  in  Sardinia  about  600. 

Finally,  there  are  two  other  Graeco-Latin  MSS.  to  be  men- 
tioned, both  of  which  once  belonged  to  Theodore  Beza,  and  both 
of  which  are  now  known  by  the  symbol  D  ;  they  are  written 
colo metrically  and  probably  belong  to  the  sixth  century.  The  one, 
'  Cantabrigiensis  '  (so  called  because  it  was  presented  by  Beza  to 
the  University  Library  of  Cambridge),  contains  the  Gospels  and  the 
Acts  ;  the  other,  '  Claromontanus  '  (so  called  from  its  birth-place, 
the  monastery  of  Clermont,  but  now  in  Paris),  contains  the  Pauline 
Epistles— Hebrews  remarkably  different  in  form  from  the  other 
thirteen.  Even  the  Latin  versions  in  both  are  particularly 
interesting,  though  some  caution  is  necessary  in  using  them  as 
witnesses  to  a  supposed  primitive  Latin  text.  But  while  the 
excellences  of  the  Greek  version  in  the  Claromontanus  enjoy 
universal  recognition,  the  Cantabrigiensis  is  at  this  moment  the 
subject  of  the  keenest  controversy.  Long  unduly  neglected  and 
even  ignored  by  the  critics,  as  being  full  of  bad  mistakes  and  spoilt 
by  numerous  interpolations,  it  has  for  the  last  ten  years  been 
extolled  as  the  version  most  nearly  approaching  the  original  text, 
and  even  as  the  representative  of  a  separate  recension,  at  any 
rate  of  the  Lucan  writings.1  Its  frequent  agreement  with  the  Old 
Latin,  and  often  with  the  Old  Syrian  and  Egyptian  versions, 
speaks  strongly  in  its  favour,  and  the  fact  that  in  the  most 

1  See  p.  451. 


606       AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

important  cases  all  the  other  Greek  manuscripts  are  against  it 
need  be  no  proof  of  its  corruption,  but  may  quite  as  well  be  due  to 
the  fact  that  it  or  its  original  (which  some  believe — somewhat 
fantastically — to  have  been  the  copy  of  Irenseus)  was  the  only 
survivor  from  a  period  in  which  the  New  Testament  text  had  not 
yet  been  subjected  to  the  polishing  which  afterwards  became  uni- 
versal. Nevertheless  it  is  indisputable  that  D  displays  a  tendency 
towards  an  arbitrary  conformation  of  the  Gospel  texts  and  a  loose 
treatment  of  its  original,  and  although  some  of  its  peculiar  readings 
may  be  very  ancient,  they  need  not  for  that  reason  be  original  ; 
moreover,  what  cause  have  we  to  suppose  that  the  corruption  of  the 
sacred  texts  had  not  already  reached  its  maximum  before  the  time 
of  Irenaeus  ?  The  tendency  to  explain,  ending  sometimes  in  mere 
paraphrase,  and  to  amplify  details  is  still  more  conspicuous  in  all 
examples  of  the  *  Western  '  text  than  the  tendency  manifested,  say, 
in  B  and  its  descendants  to  polish,  to  remove  vulgarisms  and  to 
shorten  prolixities.  It  will  be  wisest  to  recognise  both,  and  to  try 
in  each  individual  case  to  ascertain  the  original  text  by  the  help  of 
D  and  also  of  B,  N,  etc.;  neither  the  one  nor  the  other  presents  us 
with  a  faultless  original  text,  but  still  less  is  either  a  mere  dust-heap. 
But  the  most  essential  thing  for  the  advancement  of  research  on 
this  point  is  that  the  old  translations  which  follow  D  should  be 
systematically  studied,  established  in  their  true  relationship  one 
with  another  and  made  use  of  for  the  reconstruction  of  their  Greek 
originals.  [Cf.  K.  Harris  on  the  '  Codex  Bezae  '  in  '  Texts  and 
Studies  '  (Cambridge,  1891) ;  and  B.  Weiss  and  A.  Harnack  in  the 
pamphlets  mentioned  on  p.  453.  A  convenient  collation  of  D  has 
been  made  by  E.  Nestle,  in  his  '  Novi  Testament!  graeci  Supple- 
mentum'  (1896),  pp.  7-66. 

3.  (a)  Translations,  under  certain  circumstances,  may 
render  excellent  service  in  the  determination  of  the  original 
wording  of  a  text,  e.g.  when  they  are  old  and  literal, 
when  they  allow  us  to  perceive  with  some  certainty  how 
the  Greek  which  underlies  them  ran,  or  when  they  date 
from  a  time  of  which  our  records  are  insufficient.  Ceteris 
paribus  the  first-hand  translations  are  to  be  preferred  to 
the  second-hand,  the  re-translations  ;  but  even  the  latter 
are  not  quite  useless,  unless  we  are  already  familiar  with 
their  originals.  For  instance,  an  Irish  re- translation  based 
on  the  '  Itala,'  and  belonging  to  the  sixth  century,  would  be 
more  valuable  than  a  direct  Slavic  translation  of  a  Greek 


§52.]          TIIH    WITNESSES   TO    Till:    TKXTS    OF    TO-DAY  607 

text,  of  which  there  were  a  hundred  other  records.  In  fact 
the  Old  Slavic  translation,  dating  at  the  earliest  from  the 
ninth  century,  is  of  no  importance  to  the  history  of  the  text, 
and  the  same  would  be  true  of  the  Persian  and  Arabic  versions 
even  if  we  could  be  certain  that  they  were  founded  on  a 
Greek  original.  It  is  an  established  point  that  the  Egyptian, 
Gothic,  Ethiopian  and  Armenian  translations  are  from  the 
Greek,  even  though  the  Syrian  text  may  from  the  first  have 
had  some  influence  on  the  two  latter.  They  are  of  consider- 
able antiquity  :  the  Gothic,  which  is  from  the  hand  of  Bishop 
Ulfilas, might  be  dated  about  370,  the  Ethiopian  not  much  later. 
We  need  not  conclude  that  the  whole  New  Testament  was  trans- 
lated at  the  same  time ;  when  it  was  a  question  of  gradual  comple- 
tion we  may  always  assume  that  the  Gospels  and  the  Pauline 
Epistles  are  the  oldest.  Mesrobes  is  said  to  have  presented 
the  Armenians,  some  time  after  431,  with  a  Bible  in  their  own 
tongue,  and  written  in  a  peculiar  alphabet.  From  the  fourth 
century  onwards  the  need  of  possessing  the  sacred  books  in  the 
vernacular  must  have  been  the  cause  of  their  translation  into 
the  different  dialects  of  Egypt ;  for  after  about  300  we  find  the 
Greek  losing  more  and  more  ground  in  that  country,  till  at  last 
it  is  confined  to  the  capital  alone.  Large  portions  of  transla- 
tions in  the  Theban  or  Sahidic  (i.e.  Upper  Egyptian)  dialects, 
in  the  Memphian  or  Boheiric  (i.e.  the  dialect  of  the  Delta), 
and  in  that  of  Fayoum  and  other  Middle  Egyptian  districts,  have 
been  made  known  through  the  industry  of  scholars,  especially 
Danes ;  the  Boheiric  has  long  played  a  great  part  in  the 
Coptic  Church,  and  an  Arabic  re-translation  has  actually 
sprung  from  it.  But  as  yet  the  study  of  textual  history  has 
not  derived  great  profit  from  all  these  translations.  The 
Greek  originals  from  which  they  are  taken  appear  mostly  to 
approach  the  ordinary  text  very  nearly,  and  even  where  this  is 
not  the  case,  the  incompleteness  of  the  materials  presented  by 
them  prevents  our  coming  to  any  very  definite  conclusions. 
Moreover,  the  knowledge  of  Ethiopian,  of  Armenian,  and, 
above  all,  of  the  Egyptian  dialects— knowledge  indispensable 
to  the  successful  prosecution  of  such  studies — is  lacking  in 
almost  all  those  who  are  interested  in  them.  P.  DE  LAGARDE 
possessed  both  knowledge  and  interest,  but  he  died  without 


608      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

having  carried  out  his  great  schemes.  Thus  there  are  only 
two  translations  left,  the  Latin  and  the  Syrian,  from  the  com- 
parison of  which  with  the  Greek  records  we  may  expect,  on 
account  of  their  high  antiquity  and  their  comparative  acces- 
sibility, to  obtain  a  steady  increase  of  knowledge. 

(6)  We  are  accustomed  to  distinguish  two  forms  of  the 
Latin  translation :  the  Itala  and  the  Vulgate  ;  but  it  might 
be  more  accurate  to  speak  of  them  as  the  pre-Hieronymite 
and  the  Hieronyrnite  translations.  For  the  '  Vulgate,'  which 
only  obtained  this  name  in  the  Middle  Ages,  was  for  a  long 
time  by  no  means  the  '  Vulgar '  (vulgata  =  ?;  /cowrf) :  four 
centuries  passed  away  before  it  succeeded  in  ousting  its  rival 
from  ecclesiastical  use.  The  relationship  of  the  Vulgate  to 
the  Itala  in  the  case  of  the  Old  and  New  Testaments  respec- 
tively is  very  different,  since  Jerome  translated  the  former 
afresh  from  the  Hebrew,  without  any  reference  to  the 
Septuagint,  while  he  did  no  more  than  revise  the  Gospels 
superficially,  and  soon  afterwards  (in  382)  the  other  Books 
of  the  New  Testament  also,  at  the  request  of  Pope  Dama- 
sus.  He  undertook  no  fresh  translation  of  them,  however, 
but  at  the  most  a  fresh  recension  of  the  Latin  text  he 
already  possessed.  In  so  doing  he  contented  himself  as  a  rule 
with  removing  the  more  important  deviations  of  the  Latin 
from  the  Greek  in  favour  of  the  latter,  and  preferred  merely 
to  choose  from  among  various  Latin  versions  the  reading 
which  followed  the  original  most  closely,  without  inserting 
anything  of  his  own.  But,  of  course,  he  never  observed  that 
he  was  only  dealing  with  a  Greek  text,  not  with  the  Greek 
original ;  when  any  uncertainty  arises  he  seeks  the  genuine 
New  Testament  only  in  the  Greek  ('  Graecae  fidei — autoritati 
reddidi  Novum  Testamentum ').  Thus  the  translation  of  Jerome, 
with  the  characteristics  peculiar  to  it,  is  scarcely  more  than  a 
record  of  one  form  of  the  Greek  text  of  about  the  year  380. 
And  even  from  this  point  of  view  it  must  be  used  with  the 
greatest  caution,  because  Jerome  himself  did  not  do  his  work 
consistently,  and  afterwards  his  text  suffered  an  unusually 
marked  deterioration  by  being  subjected,  naturally  enough,  to 
the  influence  of  the  traditional  version.  The  different  Vulgate- 
texts  display  just  as  many  variants  as  the  original  MSS.  Not 


§  r,±]          THI-:    WITNESSES   TO    THE    TEXTS   OP    TO-DAY  609 

till  1200  did  certain  Parisian  theologians  exert  themselves 
successfully  in  the  establishment  of  a  textus  receptus,  though 
unfortunately  their  Vulgate  was  not  founded  on  the  very  best 
authorities.  It  is  due  to  the  influence  of  this  edition  that  the 
numerous  printed  versions  of  the  Vulgate  belonging  to  the 
fifteenth  and  sixteenth  centuries  including  even  those  of 
Erasmus  and  of  E.  Stephanus — do  not  differ  very  materially 
from  one  another,  and  that  it  seemed  an  easy  task  to  Pope 
Sixtus  V.  to  publish,  in  fulfilment  of  the  resolutions  of  the 
Council  of  Trent,  an  infallible  Latin  text  in  1590— although, 
indeed,  Clement  VIII.  silently  replaced  it  two  years  later  by 
one  still  more  infallible.  For  those  days  these  were  quite 
respectable  pieces  of  work,  but  the  mixed  text  which  even  the 
present  official  version  of  the  Koman  Church  represents  is  not 
sufficient  for  the  purposes  of  critical  research.  The  original 
text  of  Jerome  can  only  be  restored  by  means  of  the  ancient 
manuscripts,  among  whi'  h  the  Codex  Amiatinus,  whose  history 
we  can  trace  with  some  accuracy,  is  of  special  interest. 

The  name  of  Itala  for  the  pre-Hieronymite  texts  of  the 
Latins  was  introduced,  all  unconsciously,  by  Augustine,  who 
recommended  in  his  *  De  Doctrina  Christiana '  that  the 
'  Itala  '  should  be  preferred  to  other  Latin  translations  of  the 
Scripture,  because  it  had  the  advantage  of  being  literal 
and  intelligible  at  the  same  time.  Thus  he  must  have  known 
several  Latin  translations  (latinae  quaelibet).  By  '  Itala  '  he 
probably  meant  that  version  which  he  had  learned  to  know  and 
value  in  Italy — that  is,  when  staying  at  Milan  with  Bishop 
Ambrose.  The  translation  current  in  his  native  African 
Church  appeared  to  him  inferior,  principally  because  it  kept 
so  loosely  to  '  the  words ' — that  is,  to  the  Greek  '  original 
text '  of  about  397.  To  us  this  particular  lack  of  literalness 
would  rather  seem  to  speak  in  favour  of  the  value  of  the 
translation.  And  in  truth  the  Old  Latin  texts  are  raised  to  the 
position  of  witnesses  to  the  original  wording  of  the  first  order 
because,  while  they  are  exempted  by  the  frequent  awkward- 
ness and  barbarity  of  their  Latin  from  all  suspicion  of  having 
paraphrased  or  artificially  altered  the  form  of  the  original, 
they  yet  differ  very  markedly  from  the  Greek  texts  still  pre- 
served. Yet  they  are  certainly  prepared  from  very  ancient 

R  R 


610      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

manuscripts.  For  Cyprian  undoubtedly  quotes  from  a  Latin 
Bible,  about  the  year  250.  Still,  a  number  of  the  most  impor- 
tant questions  are  not  yet  answered :  (1)  whether  Tertullian 
used  Latin  Bible-texts  about  the  year  200  ;  (2)  whether  there 
were  several  independent  translations  or  only  one,  which 
later  became  very  much  corrupted,  or  rather  *  emendated/ 
and  (3)  whether,  if  this  were  the  case,  Africa  or  Italy  was  its 
birthplace. 

In  any  case,  the  twenty-seven  Books  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment were  not  rendered  into  Latin  all  together  by  one  trans- 
lator. Consequently  the  different  books  might  have  different 
histories ;  the  oldest  Latin  text  of  the  Gospels  and  the 
Pauline  Epistles  might  come  from  Africa,  while  perhaps  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  and  the  later  Catholic  Epistles  might 
have  a  different  origin.  But  it  is  also  possible  that  the 
Gospels  were  translated  at  several  places  in  the  West  at  about 
the  same  time,  and  that  the  similarity  between  all  the 
transmitted  texts  may  be  explained  by  the  mingling  they 
underwent  in  later  times.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Pauline 
Epistles  might  only  have  been  translated  once,  and  the  many 
different  forms  of  this  translation  have  been  due  to  its 
further  distribution  throughout  the  West,  and  especially  to 
its  frequent  comparison  by  learned  scribes  with  Greek 
manuscripts.  But  for  the  present  the  greatest  caution  is 
required  in  dealing  with  this  question.  We  possess  indeed 
countless  New  Testament  quotations  in  the  Old  Latin  authors, 
— these  have  yet  to  be  restored  to  their  original  form 
according  to  the  best  manuscripts ;  we  possess,  further, 
a  rich  store  of  fourth  century  and  later  manuscripts  (both 
complete  and  fragmentary)  of  the  pre-Hieronymite  text—- 
these also  have  to  be  thoroughly  examined  as  to  their  age, 
birth-place  (to  be  deduced  by  comparison  with  the  quota- 
tions of  the  Fathers)  and  mutual  relationship,  with  con- 
stant reference,  too,  to  all  the  non-Latin  texts.  But  first 
and  foremost  they  require  to  be  published  in  complete  and 
authentic  form.  Then  perhaps  a  history  of  the  '  Itala ' 
may  be  written  (for  it  is  to  be  hoped  that  confusion  will 
not  be  worse  confounded  by  the  sacrifice  of  this  now  well- 
established  name  to  mistaken  ideas  of  correctness)  by  the 


§52.]          THE    WITNESSES   TO    THE    TEXTS    OF    TO-DAY  611 

help  of  which  the  page  still  almost  blank  in  the  history  of 
the  Greek  Text  from  the  second  to  the  fourth  century  may 
be  satisfactorily  filled.  Remarkable  instances  of  agreement 
between  Latin  and  Oriental  texts,  as  against  all,  or  almost  all, 
other  authorities,  show  that  this  labour  would  be  well 
rewarded,  even — nay,  especially— if  it  resulted  in  the  definite 
destruction  of  certain  exaggerated  expectations. 

The  most  valuable  services  in  the  investigation  of  the  Itala  and 
the  Vulgate  were  rendered  in  the  eighteenth  century  by  G. 
Bianchini :('  Evangeliarium  quadruplex  latinae  versionis  antiquae,' 
1749)  and  P.  Sabatier  ('  Bibliorum  S.  latinae  versiones  antiquae,' 
ed.  2, 1751),  the  latter  an  attempt  at  a  complete  restoration  of  the  Old 
Latin  translations  by  means  of  manuscripts  and  quotations  of  the 
Fathers.  In  modern  times  the  work  has  been  carried  on  in  Germany 
by  B.  Eanke,  H.  Ronsch,  L.  Ziegler,  P.  Corssen,  J.  Haussleiter, 
and  E.  von  Dobschiitz  ;  in  Italy  by  G.  Amelli ;  in  England  by 
J.  Wordsworth,  Bishop  of  Salisbury,  W.  Sanday,  and  H.  J.  White  ; 
in  Norway  by  J.  Belsheim  ;  in  France  by  L.  Delisle,  P.  Batiffol  and 
S.  Berger  (in  his  excellent  '  Histoire  de  la  Vulgate  pendant  les 
premiers  siecles  du  moyen  age,'  1893).  A  very  fine  edition  of  the 
Vulgate  has  been  appearing  in  Oxford  since  1889,  entitled  '  Novum 
Testamentum  latine  secundum  editionem  S.  Hieronymi,'  edited  by 
Wordsworth  and  White  ;  but  only  the  first  volume  is  as  yet  com- 
pleted ;  the  '  Old-Latin  Biblical  Texts,'  i.-iv.  (Oxford,  1883,  1886, 
1888  and  1897),  contain  also  excellent  reprints  of  Itala  manuscripts. 
F.  C.  Burkitt,  in  his  article  on  '  The  Old-Latin  and  the  Itala '  in 
'  Texts  and  Studies,'  iv.  3,  1896,  asserts  that  what  Augustine 
understood  by  Itala  was  Jerome's  revision  of  the  Gospels,  so  that 
Itala  and  Vulgate  would  in  reality  mean  the  same  thing ;  but 
sufficient  avidence  for  this  theory  is  not  produced. 

3.  (c)  The  history  of  the  Syriac  New  Testament  is  similar 
to  that  of  the  Latin.  A  translation  rich  in  peculiar  readings 
into  the  Syriac  of  Palestine  must  for  the  present  be  left  out 
of  account,  because,  in  the  first  place,  we  are  not  certain  of 
its  age  (the  manuscripts  do  not  go  back  beyond  the  eighth 
century),  and,  in  the  second,  the  equally  important  question 
has  not  yet  been  decided  as  to  whether  this  Jerusalemic 
document  is  derived  directly  from  a  Greek  manuscript  or  is 
remodelled  from  an  Edessenic  text,  perhaps  with  reference 
to  the  Greek.  The  Syrian  Vulgate  has  been  commonly  known 

K  a  2 


612       AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

since  the  ninth  or  tenth  century  by  the  name  of  '  Peshitto,' 
meaning  '  the  simple,'  probably  either  in  the  good  sense  of 

*  not  tampered  with,'  or  in  the  deprecatory  of  *  unlearned,'  i.e. 
not  accurately  grounded  on  the  original,  but  possibly  too  in 
that  of  cnrKr)  as  opposed  to  hexaplaris.     This,  however,  can 
only  be  ascertained  from  the  history  of  the  Old  Testament, 
and  indeed  the  Old  Testament  is  the  older  portion  of  this 
translation.     About  the  year  500  Bishop  Philoxenus  of  Hiera- 
polis   caused  the   Peshitto  to   be   completed   and   improved 
according    to   certain   Greek    examples   by  a  Rural   Bishop 
named  Polycarp,  because  in  it  the  New  Testament  differed 
very  markedly  from  that  of  the  Greek  Bible,  partly  in  the 
meaning  of  several  individual  passages  and  partly  through 
the   absence   of  four   of    the   Catholic   Epistles — an   uncer- 
tainty which  caused  distress   to   the  Monophysitic  Syrians. 
But  since  even  then  there   still   remained   much   that   was 
doubtful,    the  monk  Thomas  of  Heraclea,   in  the  year  616, 
finished    the    assimilation    of    the    Syrian    Bible    to    that 
of  his  Alexandrian  brethren  by  a  translation  of  unexampled 
accuracy,     which     succeeded     in     displacing    the     original 
translation   of   Philoxenus   altogether,  and   the  Peshitto   in 
part,  among  the  Monophysites.     Or,  at  any  rate,  wherever 
the  Peshitto  was  still  used,  it  borrowed  the  books  it  had  so 
long   lacked  from   this   later   translation.      But  portions  of 
the  Peshitto  have   been  very   freely   incorporated   with   the 

*  Heracleensis  '  as  we  now  have  it,  both  from  marginal  notes 
and   from   the   memory  of  copyists ;  whereas   the   opposite 
process  has  not  been  nearly  so  frequent.     In  fact,  since  the 
beginning  of  the   Middle   Ages  the  Peshitto  has  been  pro- 
pagated  with   surprising   fidelity.     We  can  distinguish  two 
classes  of  Peshitto  manuscripts — one  West-Syrian  1  and  the 
other  East-Syrian 2 ;  within  each  of  these  the  variants  are  not 
numerous,  and   the   classes  themselves   do   not  differ  very 
considerably.     Thus  by  about  431  the  Syrian  Vulgate  i 

far  advanced  as  the  Latin  at  about  1200. 

But  the  Peshitto  of  481  has  yet  another  translation 
behind  it ;  the  quotations  of  Aphraates  and  Ephraim :J  from 
the  New  Testament  differ  so  constantly  and  so  characteris- 

1  Melchitic,  Jacobitic  and  Maronitic.         *  Nestorian.         3  See  pp.  539  fol. 


§  .-,:>.]  THI-:    WITNKSSKS   TO    THK    TKXTS    OP    TO-DAY 

tically  from  the  wording  of  the  Peshitto,  in  spite  of  a  great 
deal  of  agreement  which  cannot  be  accidental,  that  we  might 
take  the  present  Peshitto  simply  as  a  Recension,  based  as  far 
as  possible  on  an  emendated  Greek  text,  of  an  older— 
probably  third  century— translation.  This  older  text  natu- 
rally has  the  greater  interest  for  us.  But  most  valuable  of 
all  would  be  the  authentic  text  of  the  Syrian  *  Diatessaron,' * 
which  springs  from  yet  older  sources,  and  which,  moreover, 
as  might  have  been  expected,  has  strongly  influenced  the  text 
of  the  separate  Gospels.  But  we  can  scarcely  hope  for  a 
complete  reconstruction  of  this. 

The  publication  of  the  actual  Old  Syrian  New  Testament 
was  begun  in  1858  by  W.  Cureton,  after  whom  the  transla- 
tion of  the  Gospels —unfortunately  preserved  but  in  very 
fragmentary  form — was  named  Syrus  Curetonianus  ;  another 
and  perhaps  still  older  text — known  as  the  Sinaiticus  from 
its  having  been  discovered  in  a  palimpsest  belonging  to  the 
Monastery  of  St.  Catherine  on  Mount  Sinai — has,  however, 
very  few  omissions,  and  was  published  in  1894  by  Bensly, 
B.  Harris  and  Burkitt.  These  two  texts  have  a  number  of 
peculiar  readings  in  common,  but  the  Sinaiticus  alone  con- 
tains some  of  almost  greater  interest ;  unfortunately,  how- 
ever, theological  considerations  bore  a  large  part  in  the  mould- 
ing of  this  latter  text,  and  for  the  present  we  must  beware 
of  exaggerating  its  value  as  a  witness.  The  history  of  the 
Syriac  Text  of  the  New  Testament  is,  in  fact,  still  more 
involved  than  that  of  the  Latin. 

Cf.  the  '  Evangeliarium  Hierosolymitanum  '  edited  by  P.  de 
Lagarde  in  the  '  Bibliotheca  Syriaca,'  in  which  two  manuscripts 
discovered  on  Mount  Sinai  by  Agnes  S.  Lewis  and  Margaret 
D.  Gibson  in  1892  and  1893  are  made  use  of.  Also  '  The 
Palestinian  Syriac  Lectionary  of  the  Gospels '  (1899 :  frag- 
ments of  the  Pauline  Epistles  and  the  Acts,  belonging  to  the  same 
type  of  translation),  edited  by  G.  William  in  the  'Anecdota 
Oxoniensia'  (1893)  and  by  Mrs.  Lewis  in '  StudiaSinaitica,'  vi.  1897 
For  the  study  of  the  Peshitto  the  edition  of  the  Dutch  scholars 
Leusden  and  Schaaf,  entitled  '  Novum  Testamentum  syriacum  ' 
(1709)  is  still  indispensable ;  it  has  a  Latin  translation  and  is 
furnished  with  an  array  of  variants. — The  Heracleensis  was  edited 

1  See  pp.  493  fol. 


614      AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  n. 

by  Joseph  White  between  1778  and  1803 ;  the  most  important 
supplement  to  it  is  the  '  Apocalypse  of  St.  John  in  a  Syriac  Version 
hitherto  unknown,'  edited  by  J.  Gwynn  (1897). — The  Diatessaron  is 
partially  preserved  in  the  Armenian  translation  of  Ephraim's  Com- 
mentary ;  see  the  Latin  version  by  J.  B.  Aucher  and  G.  Moesinger 
entitled  '  Evangelii  concordantis  Expositio  facta  a  S.  Ephraemo  ' 
(1876).  The  Arabic  and  Latin  versions  of  the  Diatessaron  are  less 
trustworthy.  All  the  material  is  turned  to  account  in  Zahn's 
1  Forschungen  zur  Geschichte  des  Neutestamentlichen  Kanons,'  i., 
1881,  and  iv.,  1891,  pp.  225-46 ;  see  also  his  '  Gesch.  des.  N.T.lichen 
Kanons,'  vol.  ii.  pp.  530-56.  The  material  of  the  Curetonianus 
has  been  made  accessible  to  all  by  F.  Bathgen  in  '  Evangelienfrag- 
mente  des  griechischen  Texts  des  Cureton'schen  Syrers  wiederher- 
gestellt '  (1885) ;  that  of  the  Sinaiticus  by  A.  Merx  in  '  Die  4 
kanon.  Evglien.  nach  ihrem  altesten  bekannten  Texte;  eine 
Ubersetzung  des  syrischen  im  Sinaikloster  gefundenen  Palimpsest- 
handschrift '  (1897).  A  list  of  the  Variants  in  the  Sinaiticus  and 
the  Curetonianus  is  given  by  C.  Holzhey  in  '  Die  neuentdeckte  Cod. 
Sinait.  untersucht '  (1896).  For  a  criticism  of  the  new  text  see 
Wellhausen's  '  Nachrichten  der  Gottinger  Gesellschaft  der  Wissen- 
schaft '  (1895,  no.  1). — As  yet  no  universal  adoption  of  symbols  to 
prevent  vexatious  confusion  has  been  found  practicable  with  the 
different  Syriac  texts. 


615 


CHAPTEK  III 

THE    GREAT    RECENSIONS    OF    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT    TEXT 
SINCE    1516 

[Cf.  E.  Keuss  :  '  Bibliotheca  Novi  Testament!  graeci,'  1872 : 
the  most  comprehensive  description  ever  made  of  the  printed 
editions  of  the  New  Testament  down  to  about  I860.] 

§  53.  The  Formation  of  the  New  Testament  '  Textus 
receptus '  (to  about  1630) 

1.  From  the  moment  when  the  Greek  New  Testament 
began  to  profit  by  the  invention  of  printing — and  it  is  signifi- 
cant that  this  was  not  until  the  sixteenth  century— a  new  period 
dawns  in  the  history  of  its  Text.  The  form  of  the  New 
Testament  interests  us  no  longer,  because  only  the  same  long- 
established  form  was  applied  to  the  sacred  texts  as  to  all 
other  books,  and  also  because  its  peculiarities  no  longer  exert 
any  influence  upon  the  contents.  It  might  seem  at  first  sight 
as  though  all  the  former  deplorable  results  of  production  on  a 
large  scale  would  but  be  increased  a  thousandfold  by  printing. 
But  in  reality  the  new  method  of  multiplication  did  not  by 
any  means  result  in  creating  a  still  greater  dissimilarity 
between  the  texts,  but,  on  the  contrary,  in  drawing  them 
more  and  more  closely  together.  A  few  errors,  unknown 
before,  may  indeed  have  found  their  way  into  the  New  Testa- 
ment text  since  1500,  through  the  carelessness  of  editors  or 
the  unskilfulness  of  printers  ;  but  it  was  far  more  difficult  for 
these  to  maintain  themselves  in  such  a  text,  before  the  public 
opinion  of  hundreds  of  owners  and  readers,  than  in  a  manu- 
script never  accessible  to  more  than  a  few,  in  which  error  and 
truth  might  be  perpetuated  side  by  side  from  one  generation 


616      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  m. 

to  another.  The  publisher  who  sent  out  a  thousand  similar 
copies  of  a  New  Testament  into  the  world  together  was 
obliged  to  proceed  with  greater  care  than  a  Calligrapher  of 
the  old  times,  who  always  had  the  Corrector  to  fall  back 
upon.  A  scholar  of  the  humanist  period  was,  in  any  case, 
anxious  to  draw  up  his  text  according  to  the  oldest  and  most 
correct  original  to  be  had,  and  the  comparison  of  different 
manuscripts,  which  was  here  unavoidable,  naturally  roused  the 
critical  impulse.  Thus  we  find  Erasmus  choosing  between 
several  available  copies  (or  rather  readings) ;  others  gave 
their  readers  plentiful  materials  to  choose  from,  and  though 
custom  and  dogma  did  not  at  first  permit  the  growth  of  these 
fresh  shoots,  the  fact  remains  that  with  the  multiplication  of 
the  Greek  New  Testament  by  means  of  printing,  a  reaction 
set  in,  a  backward  movement  towards  older  and  better  texts— 
although  indeed  it  was  long  before  this  became  a  conscious, 
methodical  search  after  the  oldest  and  best  text  to  be  found. 
The  printed  editions  of  the  New  Testament,  in  so  far  as 
they  really  deserve  mention — that  is,  possess  a  certain  inde- 
pendence of  their  own— are  no  longer  mere  reproductions, 
but  recensions,  versions  of  the  text  founded  on  critical 
principles. 

2.  The  editio  princeps  of  the  Greek  Testament  was  pre- 
pared by  Erasmus  in  1516  for  the  bookseller  Frobenin  Basle. 
He  based  it  upon  very  late  manuscripts  :  for  the  Apocalypse 
he  used  one  of  the  twelfth  century  which  broke  off  at  verse 
xxii.  16,  and  made  up  the  missing  portion  simply  by  re- trans- 
lating from  the  Latin  text !  Even  the  subsequent  editions 
of  1519-22-27-35  are  not  substantially  improved ;  they 
still  contain  readings  without  any  manuscript  foundation.1 
The  Complutensian  Polyglot  (giving  both  the  Latin  and 
Greek  texts,  and  in  the  Old  Testament,  as  far  as  possible, 
the  Hebrew  also)  contains  far  more  valuable  work.  It  was 
issued  at  Alcala  (=Complutum)  by  Spanish  scholars  under 
the  leadership  of  Cardinal  Ximenes.  The  New  Testament  (in 
Greek  and  Latin)  was  ready  as  early  as  January  1514,  but 
the  complete  Bible  did  not  attain  publicity  until  1521. 
Although  Erasmus  might  have  learnt  much  from  it,  its 

1  E.g.,  1.  Peter  iii.  20 :  &ira£  ^eSf'x*™  instead  of  di 


§53.]     FORMATION"    OF  w  TKXTl.'S    KKCEITUS  '  (TO    C.  1630 )     617 

Greek  text  was  not  drawn  from  much  better  sources  than 
his  own. 

3.  Both  editions   have   often   been   reprinted,   generally 
with  fresh  errors  in  the  printing.     But  the  editions  of  the 
Parisian  bookseller,  Robert  Estienne  (Stephanus),  possess  a 
higher  value,  especially  the  third  (1550),  called  the  *  Editio 
Regia.'     This  man  profited  by  the  preparatory  labours  of  his 
stepfather,  Colinaeus,  and  was  assisted  in  the  comparison  of 
manuscripts  by  his  learned  son  Henri ;  really  valuable  manu- 
scripts, such  as  Codex  L  for  the  Gospels,  were  employed  by 
him,  and  he  even  ventured  to  insert  a  few  variants  in  the 
margin.     In  the  text  he  follows  the  Erasmian  of  1535  almost 
exclusively,    except    for    the    Gospels  and   Acts — and   even 
recurs  to  it  occasionally  in   passages  where  he  had  before 
preferred   the   better   readings   of   the   Complutensis.      The 
Genevan  reprint  of  the  '  Regia,'  dated  1551,  is  famous  on 
account  of  the  division  of   the  chapters  into  verses  which 
Stephanus  introduced  into  it.     This  arrangement,  in  spite  of 
its  serious  defects,  was  universally  accepted,  with  but  insig- 
nificant alterations,  from  the  seventeenth  century  onwards, 
for  although  Pope  Sixtus  V.  had  adopted  a  different  system 
of    division    in    his    official    edition    of    the    Vulgate,    his 
successor    Clement    VIII.    had   returned    to   the   system   of 
Stephanus    in    his    edition    of    1592.      The    arrangement, 
especially  when  each  verse  is  printed  separately,  has  rendered 
a  fatal  assistance  towards  the  conception  of  the  New  Testament 
as  a  string  of  disconnected  mottoes  and  oracles.     Still  more 
ambitious  resources  than  those  of  his  predecessors  were  em- 
ployed by  the  Calvinist  Theodore  Beza,  who  printed  many 
Grseco-Latin  New  Testaments  from  1565  onwards.     Besides 
the  manuscripts  mentioned  on  p.  605,  he  even  made  com- 
parisons   with    older    translations    and    quotations   in    the 
Fathers,    and   in   his   notes   often   gives   valuable   hints   to 
textual  critics,  though  he  scarcely  dared  seriously  to  alter  the 
text ;    the  text  of   Stephanus,  indeed,  which  he  took  as  his 
model,  may  almost  be  said  to  be  better  than  his  own. 

4.  The  following  century  produced  nothing  but  reprints, 
of  which  indeed  scarcely  one  agreed  word  for  word  with  the 
model ;    but,  after  all,  the  existing  editions  did  not  differ  so 


618      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  in. 

very  widely  one  from  another,  not  even  the  Complutensian 
from  the  Erasmian.  The  process  of  mingling  has  now  begun, 
with  the  result  that  Beza's  text  sets  the  standard  more  and 
more.  But  the  brothers  Elzevier  of  Leyden  had  the  greatest 
success  among  the  publishers  of  these  New  Testament  texts. 
Their  editions  (from  1624  onwards)  were  recommended  by 
their  elegant  form  and  clear  print,  and  took  possession  first 
of  Holland  and  the  other  Keformed  countries,  and  finally, 
under  the  sway  of  Pietism  (about  1700),  of  the  Lutheran 
territory  as  well.  These  texts  of  the  Elzeviers,  which,  more- 
over, do  not  correspond  entirely  with  one  another  or  with 
their  numerous  reprints,  and  which  make  quite  arbitrary 
though  trifling  alterations  in  the  Stephano-Bezan  text,  are 
the  type  of  the  so-called  *  Textus  receptus ' l — that  is,  of  the 
universally  accepted  version,  which  Protestant  scholasticism 
in  particular  has  naively  regarded  as  the  original  and  literally 
inspired  text  of  the  New  Testament. 

§54.  The  Attacks  on  the  'Textus  receptus' 
(down  to  circa  1830) 

1.  Doubts  as  to  the  trustworthiness  of  the  Textus  receptus 
— which  were  indeed  bound  to  arise  as  soon  as  the  polyglot 
editions  of  Antwerp,  Paris  or  London  were  compared  with  it 
— were  soon  expressed,  though  timidly  at  first.  Reprints  were 
made  of  it,  but  at  the  same  time  variants  were  collected,  and 
more  or  less  clear  references  made  to  their  superiority.  The 
place  of  honour  in  this  respect  is  due  to  Stephan  Curcellseus 
the  Arminian,  who  in  1658  drew  up  an  edition  of  the  New 
Testament  in  Amsterdam,  in  which,  though  he  followed  the 
Elzevier  edition  (only  bracketing  the  'Comma  Johanneum/ 
1.  John  v.  7  and  8),  he  yet  furnished  a  very  considerable 
stock  of  variant  readings.  These  he  collected  from  older 
editions,  from  commentaries,  and  from  good  manuscripts 
not  previously  collated ;  some  are  even  pure  conjecture, 
taken,  for  instance,  from  H.  Stephanus,  I.  Casaubon,  and 
D.  Heinsius;  for  he  considered  that  even  though  the 
authority  for  such  readings  was  not  equal  to  that  of  readings 
supported  by  the  evidence  of  ancient  manuscripts,  some  of 

1  Known  by  the  symbol  r,  the  Greek  initial  letter  of  Stephanus. 


§  54.]    ATTACKS  ON  THE  '  TEXTUS  RECEPTUS  '  (TO  C.  1830)    619 

them  were  yet  so  strongly  recommended  by  internal  probability 
that   in  the   mere   interests   of  truth   they  ought  not  to  be 
despised.     The  readings  of  the  Tcxtus  vulgatus,  he  contended, 
were  at  least  not  always  better  than  the  variants  ;  the  next 
thing  to  do  would  be  to  add  all  the  variants  to  the  text,  and 
then  a  sound  judgment  might  be  trusted  to  find  out  the  correct 
reading.     He  gives  a  very  reasonable  opinion,  too,  as  to  the 
rise  and  religious  significance  of  the  variations  of  the  text, 
and  it  is  to  be  regretted  that  he  was  not  able  to  carry  out  his 
plan   of    making   use   of    the  far   richer    material   he   had 
collected   in   the   course   of   his   work,  in   a   larger   edition. 
English   theologians,    although   they   entertained   a   greater 
respect  for  the  receptus,  achieved  collections  of  variants  of 
far  greater  exhaustiveness,  especially  owing  to  their  use  of 
the  Oriental  translations.     Of  these  we  may  specify  J.  Fell, 
1675,   and    J.   Mill,    1707.     The   Low-German   Gerhard    of 
Maestricht  next  showed  in  his  edition  (1711)  that  Curcellaeus 
and  K.  Simon  had  not  written  in  vain,  for  the  question  as 
to  the  best  use  to  be  made  of  the  variants  already  occupies 
his  mind.     Textual   criticism,  which    Simon  had  made   the 
order  of  the  day,  obtained  a  remarkably  brilliant  promoter  in 
J.  J.  Wettstein  of  Basle,  who  laboured  from  1713  onwards 
at  the  improvement  of  the  traditional  texts,  thereby  incurring 
the  suspicion  of  heresy.    At  last  he  was  obliged  to  take  refuge 
with  the  Arminians  in  Holland,  and  there,  shortly  before  his 
death,1   was  able  to  complete  his  life's  work,   the  'Novum 
Testamentum  graecum  cum  variis  Lectionibus  et  Commenta- 
rio,  II  Tomis,'  which  has  retained  its  value  down  to  the  present 
day.     He,  too,  held  in  all  essentials  to  the  late  text  of  the 
printed  editions  ;  but  he  did  not  leave  his  readers  in  any  doubt 
as  to  which  readings  he  himself  preferred  to  those  standing 
in  the  text,  and  did  not  shun  the  deductions  which  his  stock  of 
variants,  much  improved  by  his  unwearied  industry  in  collec- 
tion and  his  thirst  for  accuracy,  seemed  to  impose  upon  him. 
2.  But  even  in  Wettstein's  lifetime,  editions  had  appeared 
in  which  the  Textus  receptus  was  forced  to  give  way  on  many 
points  to  the  tradition  embodied  in  the  manuscripts.     That 
philologist  of  genius,  Richard  Bentley,  attempted  to  construct  a 

1  fl754. 


620      AX    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  in. 

New  Testament  according  to  the  best  records,  and  in  the  22nd 
chapter  of  the  Apocalypse,  which  he  published  in  1720  as  a 
tentative  effort,  he  abandoned  the  Textus  receptus  in  over  forty 
places.  Unfortunately,  however,  he  did  not  follow  up  this  first 
essay,  and  the  editions  of  Wace  (1729)  and  Harwood  (1776),  in 
which  the  manuscripts  were  seriously  preferred  to  the  printed 
versions — though  naturally  with  much  one-sidedness — were 
either  decried  or  ignored  by  the  orthodox  party.  But  J.  A. 
Bengel 1  of  Wiirtemberg  secured  a  far  greater  influence,  in 
spite  of  violent  opposition.  His  New  Testament,  first  published 
in  1734,  and  often  reprinted  since,  removed  a  number  of  un- 
doubted mistakes  in  the  receptus.  His  alterations  are  almost 
always  correct — they  are  only  far  too  few.  But  he  had  other 
merits  besides  his  boldness  (which  was  all  the  more  effective 
because  of  his  exegetical  insight  and  his  well-known  piety)  : 
even  those  variants  which  were  not  '  admitted  '  he  classified 
according  to  their  degrees  of  excellence,  and  did  not  allow  his 
judgment  to  depend  on  the  caprices  of  critics  or  the  chance 
results  of  statistics,  but  formed  the  manuscript  records  into 
groups,  and,  instead  of  isolated  examples,  ranged  the  families 
of  texts  together — no  matter  whether  they  were  composed  of 
a  hundred  manuscripts  or  only  of  two — and  examined  the 
evidence  they  supplied.  J.  S.  Semler  2  took  up  this  happy 
idea  and  carried  it  yet  further,  thinking  himself  justified  first 
and  foremost  in  distinguishing  a  Syriac  and  an  Egyptian 
*  Eecension  '  of  the  Greek  text.  This  was  the  starting-point 
for  the  true  historical  study  of  the  texts. 

Fortunately  the  effort  to  increase  the  apparatus,  to  ad- 
vance the  knowledge  of  the  ancient  texts  of  the  New  Testament, 
did  not  cease  during  this  clearing  process.  Danish  as  well  as 
German  scholars  rendered  valuable  services  at  that  time  in 
this  direction.  The  first  master  of  textual  criticism  capable 
of  using  the  material  at  hand  for  a  systematic  emendation 
of  the  New  Testament  text  appeared  now  to  have  arrived  in 
the  person  of  J.  J.  Griesbach,3  Professor  of  the  University  of 
Jena.  He  created  almost  a  new  Textus  receptus,  published  in 
numerous  editions  from  1774  onwards,  besides  which  his  other 
pamphlets  and  his  commentaries  on  the  history  of  the  text 

1  t  1752.  -  f  1791.  s  f  1812. 


§65.]       THE    DOWNFALL    OF   THE    *  TEXTUS    RECEPTUS '        621 

ought  not  to  be  forgotten.  He  proceeded  in  as  conservative 
a  spirit  as  possible,  so  that  there  can  be  no  idea  of  a  real 
downfall  of  the  old  receptus.  He  distinguished  the  readings 
worth  considering  from  those  of  undoubted  authenticity,  and 
noted  them  in  the  margin.  Moreover,  he  always  believed 
it  possible  to  defend  the  best  text  by  exegesis.  Going  further 
along  the  path  marked  out  by  Bengel  and  Semler,  he  distin- 
guished three  classes  of  texts,  the  Occidental,  the  Alexandrian, 
and  the  Byzantine ;  but  while  displaying  a  healthy  pre- 
ference for  the  first  two,  he  defined  his  families  far  too 
hastily,  far  too  much  in  general  and  abstract  terms. 
Griesbach  was  doubtless  in  the  right  as  compared  with  his 
adversaries,  one  of  whom,  the  Saxon  C.  F.  MatthJii,  in  Moscow, 
attempted  with  the  blindest  prejudice  to  establish  the  New 
Testament  text  from  certain  late  Greek  manuscripts — thus 
from  the  very  worst  sources  ;  while  another,  A.  Scholz,  a 
Catholic  of  Bonn,  sought  in  a  very  similar  manner  to  iden- 
tify the  Byzantine  text  with  that  of  the  primitive  Churches 
of  Asia,  and — unlike  Matthai  on  this  point — often  worked 
exceedingly  carelessly.  But  Griesbach  himself  steered  his 
course  too  much  according  to  the  Textus  receptus,  which 
he  only  sought  to  amend  by  making  compromises,  instead 
of  ruthlessly  expelling  it  from  the  domain  it  had  usurped. 
Science  was  bound  to  pass  on  beyond  him  in  her  forward 
march. 


§  55.  The  Downfall  of  the  f  Textus  receptus  '  and  the 
latest  Textual  Criticism 

[Cf.  A.  Biiegg,  '  Die  N.T.liche  Textkritik  seit  Lachmaun  '  (1892, 
97  pp.] 

1.  In  1830,  the  celebrated  philologist  Carl  Lachmann  ' 
undertook  the  task  of  drawing  up  a  New  Testament  text 
strictly  according  to  the  approved  methods  of  philological 
criticism.  The  first  small  edition  appeared  in  1831  ;  a 
larger  one,  produced  in  collaboration  with  P.  Buttmann  of 
Berlin,  between  1842  and  1850.  The  printed  editions  and 
the  whole  of  the  Byzantine  group  are  ignored  ;  it  is  left  to 


622     AN   INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  in. 

the  oldest  Greek  and  Latin  manuscripts  to  decide,  not  how 
the  original  text  ran,  but  which  text  was  most  widely 
distributed  in  the  Greek  Church  before  the  year  400.  There 
was  something  sublime  in  this  renunciation  of  the  highest 
aim,  and  indeed  the  hope  can  no  longer  be  cherished  that  the 
complete  loss  of  all  the  autographs  can  ever  be  compensated 
for  by  the  results  of  textual  criticism.  Lachmann's  merit 
lies  in  his  having  demolished  the  '  infallible  '  text  once  and 
for  all,  and  in  having  set  up  a  new  and  attainable  goal  and 
clearly  pointed  out  the  way  to  it.  He  himself,  however, 
did  not  attain  it :  first,  because  he  left  out  of  account  at 
least  one  whole  class  of  valuable  witnesses — the  quotations 
from  the  Fathers  and  the  translations  (except  the  Latin)  — 
and  also  that  of  the  later  Greek  manuscripts,  which  are  at 
any  rate  not  wholly  to  be  despised  ;  and,  secondly,  because  the 
knowledge  of  the  all-important  authorities  was  not  sufficiently 
advanced  in  his  time. 

2.  The  Leipzig  Professor  Constantin  von  Tischendorf l 
devoted  the  whole  energies  of  his  life  to  the  newly  imposed 
task.  As  early  as  1841  he  issued  one  New  Testament,  and 
countless  others  followed,  their  texts  differing  very  markedly 
one  from  another  ;  the  best  he  left  behind  him  in  the  so- 
called  eighth  edition,  '  Critica  Major,'  1864-72,  which  was 
supplemented  by  C.  E.  Gregory.2  Here  we  have  a  compara- 
tively good  text,  as  complete  a  collection  as  possible  of  the 
variants  to  each  verse,  and  a  careful  description  of  all  the 
textual  evidence  extant.  The  work  will  long  be  indispensable 
for  students  in  this  department.  It  is  true  that  the  text  thus 
presented  is  again  only  that  of  the  fourth  century,  for 
Tischendorf  decidedly  prefers  the  oldest  Greek  Uncials  ;  and 
in  the  supplementary  apparatus  there  is  much  to  improve, 
to  add  to,  and  to  rearrange.  But  without  Tischendorf  this 
apparatus  would  never  have  been  brought  together,  and  a 
number  of  manuscripts,  among  them  the  two  oldest  Greek 
texts,  have  become  accessible  to  science  through  him  alone. 
It  was  perhaps  due  rather  to  his  thirst  for  applause,  which 
always  drove  him  to  use  up  his  new  treasures  with  undue 
haste  in  the  recension  of  the  New  Testament  text,  than  to  his 

1  1 1874.  2  See  p.  r,7«i. 


§  55.]       THE    DOWNFALL   OF   THE    '  TEXTUS   RECEPTUS  '       623 

prejudices  in  dealing  with  fundamental  historical  questions, 
that,  in  spite  of  his  enthusiasm  and  his  rare  endowment  for 
such  work,  he  did  not  attain  to  so  much  permanence  in  it  as, 
in  every  phase  of  his  development,  he  believed  himself  to  have 
attained. 

3.  The  co-operation  of  the  modern  English  theologians  in 
this  department  has  been  of  special  value.  The  first  place 
must  be  given  to  S.  P.  Tregelles,1  who  began  his  great  edition 
of  the  Greek  New  Testament,  based  on  the  oldest  authorities, 
in  1857,  and  only  completed  it  after  he  had  become  para- 
lysed. His  text  stands  midway  between  Lachmann's  and 
Tischendorf's ;  with  far  richer  materials  he  seeks  to  carry 
out  the  principles  of  Lachmann  consistently,  but  in  so  doing 
takes  an  important  step  in  advance :  when  two  readings  are 
supported  by  equal  evidence  he  does  not  reject  the  one, 
but  draws  attention  to  the  uncertainty  between  them  within 
the  text  itself. 

The  edition  of  the  Cambridge  Professors  B.  F.  Westcott 
and  F.  J.  A.  Hort  (1881)  -  carries  this  system  of  alternative 
readings  to  a  still  finer  point.  In  vol.  i.  they  give  the  text,  a 
statement  of  their  critical  principles  and  premisses,  and  a  list 
of  third-  and  fourth-rate  readings,  which  cannot  seriously  enter 
into  competition  with  those  offered  in  the  text  or  on  the 
margin,  but  which  deserve  special  consideration  on  account  of 
their  good  and  early  attestation,  or  else  on  grounds  of  internal 
probability.  The  end  is  formed  by  an  index  of  the  Old 
Testament  quotations.  The  second  volume  contains  a  detailed 
Introduction  to  New  Testament  textual  criticism,  and  a 
justification  of  the  authors'  innovations.  The  Appendix  is 
mainly  devoted  to  a  technical  commentary  on  the  '  select 
readings  '  of  vol.  i.  A  complete  supplementary  apparatus  is 
not  given,  but  the  history  of  individual  typical  passages  is 
carefully  examined,  and,  based  on  these,  a  genealogical  tree  is 
prepared,  in  the  branches  of  which  all  the  records  extant 
find  a  place.  This  enables  them  to  be  estimated,  not  as  in- 
dividual records  according  to  the  mere  accident  of  their  age, 

1  f!875. 

-  The  New  Testament  in  tlic  original  Greek ;    a  new  edition  appeared  in 
1898  of  vol.  i.  and  in  1896  of  vol.  ii.,  containing  a  few  corrections  and  additions. 


624     AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT     [CHAP.  m. 

but  according  to  their  place  in  the  family  tree.  The  con- 
nection with  Bengel  is  more  than  a  mere  superficial  one,  though 
the  difference  in  result  shows  in  a  most  satisfactory  manner 
how  far  the  history  of  the  text  has  advanced  since  his 
time.  Westcott  and  Hort  consider  it  necessary  to  distinguish  : 
(1)  a  neutral  text,  mainly  represented  by  B,  and  still  free  from 
characteristic  deformities  ;  (2)  an  Occidental  text,  which  had 
already  spread  from  Antioch  to  Kome  before  the  year  200, 
became  the  foundation  for  the  Itala  and  the  Peshitto,  and  is 
plentifully  represented  in  the  quotations  of  early  Western 
Fathers  and  also  in  early  manuscripts  such  as  the  Gospel  - 
Codex  D  :  it  has  a  tendency  towards  glossing  and  paraphras- 
ing ;  (3)  an  Alexandrian  text,  represented  specially  by  K  and  A, 
and  showing  attempts  at  polishing  and  the  eradication  of 
grammatical  errors  ;  and  (4)  a  late  Syriac  text,  more  and  more 
widely  distributed  from  the  year  300  onwards,  and  at  last  reign- 
ing alone,  with  Constantinople  as  its  head-quarters  ;  it  arose 
through  the  mingling  of  all  the  others  and  has  a  special  ten- 
dency towards  the  removal  of  difficulties.  Naturally  No.  4 
stands  at  the  bottom  of  the  scale,  while  what  is  peculiar  to  2 
and  3,  if  not  vouched  for  elsewhere,  should  also  be  rejected. 
But  unfortunately  the  representatives  of  2  and  3  often  follow 
a  parallel  course,  and  it  is  also  extremely  uncertain  whether 
we  may  venture  to  speak  of  a  neutral  text  at  all. 

4.  A  survey  of  the  present  New  Testament  text,  the  result 
of  such  gigantic  efforts  of  unwearied  industry  and  of  the  best- 
trained  learning,  presents  no  very  encouraging  picture.  The 
authorities  of  the  nineteenth  century  still  differ  very  con- 
siderably amongst  themselves — how  much,  may  be  con- 
veniently studied  in  '  The  Resultant  Greek  Testament '  of 
K.  F.  Weymouth  (1886).  The  same  service  is  rendered 
within  humbler  limits  by  the  best  of  the  Pocket  Editions, 
by  0.  Von  Gebhart's  second  stereotyped  edition  entitled 
'  Das  Neue  Testament  griechisch  nach  Tischendorf's  letzter 
Recension,  und  deutsch  nach  dem  revidirten  Luthertext, 
mit  Angabe  abweichender  Lesarten  beider  Texte  und  aus- 
gewahlten  Parallelstellen  '  (Leipzig,  1884),  and  by  the  mar- 
vellously cheap  edition  published  in  1898  by  the  '  Wiir- 
tembergische  Bibelanstalt.'  In  this  latter  E.  Nestle  bases 
his  text  upon  Tischendorf,  Westcott  and  Weymouth,  on 


§55.]        THE    DOWNFALL    OF    T1IK    fc  TKXTl'S    KKCKl'TUS '       625 

the  principle  of  adopting  such  readings  as  a  majority  of  the 
three  authorities  are  agreed  upon,  while  noting  the  deviations 
of  the  minority  regularly  in  his  footnotes.     But  what  con- 
stitutes the  peculiarity  of  his  edition  is  that  he  feels  bound 
to  include  certain  readings  from  manuscripts  which  had  not 
found  favour  with  any  of  the  other  great  editors  ;  in  fact,  in 
the  historical  Books  this  part  of  his  supplementary  material  is 
often  the  fullest.     Moreover,  a  comparison,  say,  between  the 
texts  of  the  Acts  adopted  first  by  Hilgenfeld  in  his  '  Acta  Apo- 
stolorum  graece  et  latine  sec.  antiquissimos  testes  '  (1899),  and 
next  by  B.  Weiss  in  his '  Textkritische  Untersuchungen  liber  das 
N.  T.'  (1894-99),  shows  how  slight  is  the  unanimity  of  critics 
even  in  fundamental  questions ;  the  Codex  D,  which  the  one 
writer  regards  as  by  far  the  most  valuable  authority,  is  con- 
sidered by  the  other  to  be  unusually  corrupt,  and  in  his  reliance 
on  B,  Weiss  decidedly  outbids  the  English.     Practically,  only 
one  point  is  admitted  by  all  the  different  schools  of  criticism 
— the  worthlessness  of  the  Textus  receptus ;  otherwise  the  only 
department  in  which  tolerable  unanimity  has  been  attained 
is  that  of  the  Pauline  Epistles.     With  the  other  Books  of  the 
New  Testament  we  are  at  this  moment  further  removed  from 
such  a  goal  than  ever,  partly  because  the  interests  of  the  so- 
called   Higher   Criticism   interfere  with  the  progress  of  the 
Lower.     Thus  we  see  the  British  Bible  Society  calmly  con- 
tinuing to  advertise  the  exploded  Receptus ,  but  even  most  of 
those  who  use  worthier  editions  have  no  conception  of  the 
uncertainty  that  still  clings  to  the  text  of  the  New  Testament 
at  innumerable  points,  nor  of  the  number  of  mistakes  on  which 
the  translations,  revered  by   many   as   Holy  Scripture,  are 
based. 

5.  An  effectual  furtherance  of  the  work  of  textual  criticism 
—that  is,  the  establishment  of  confidence  in  the  form  of  the 
text  already  won  by  criticism — may  perhaps  best  be  expected 
from  a  more  exhaustive  study  of  the  oldest  versions  and  of 
the  writings  of  the  Fathers.  There  is  little  to  be  hoped  from 
the  discovery  of  new  Greek  manuscripts,  unless  indeed 
papyrus  remains  from  the  first  centuries,  containing  the 
original  Greek  text,  can  be  found.  But  the  research  into  the 
Itala  is  only  in  its  infancy ;  that  into  the  Syriac  Bible  is 

8  S 


626      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE    NEW    TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  in. 

scarcely  further  advanced.  The  individual  ecclesiastical 
writers  must  be  examined  side  by  side  with  the  manuscripts, 
and  the  text  they  used  must  be  inserted  in  its  place  in  the 
manuscripts  known  to  us.  But  the  hope  that  we  may  in 
every  case  recover  the  original  text  by  this  means  is  quite 
extinguished.  Internal  criticism,  again,  has  its  place  as  well 
as  external ;  a  reading  supported  by  excellent  evidence  must 
nevertheless  be  rejected  if  one  with  apparently  little  in  its 
favour  is  yet  vouched  for  by  the  context,  or  by  the  style  and 
thought  of  the  author  in  question.  The  exegete  must  no 
longer  treat  the  work  of  the  textual  critic  as  outside  his 
province,  but  ought  on  the  contrary  to  put  the  rules  of  textual 
criticism  into  practice  himself — not,  however,  if  he  is  one  for 
whom  the  orthodox  dogma  forms,  though  perhaps  uncon- 
sciously, the  touchstone  for  the  reading  to  be  admitted. 
Under  certain  circumstances  even  conjecture  may  be  permis- 
sible. When  the  original  reading  is  only  supported  by  two 
independent  witnesses  in  one  place,  in  another  only  by  one, 
why  should  it  not  be  supported  by  none  at  all  (among  those 
that  we  possess)  in  a  third  ?  In  the  very  oldest  times,  into 
which  none  of  our  records  of  the  New  Testament  extend,  the 
text  was  often  copied  by  quite  unskilful  hands,  and  it  was 
precisely  at  that  time  that  it  was  handled  most  freely,  and  that 
what  the  copyist  did  not  understand  or  did  not  think  suitable 
was  remodelled  without  hesitation  according  to  what  was  more 
convenient  or  seemed  easier  to  say.  Explanatory,  softening 
or  edifying  additions  were  admitted  with  special  readiness 
into  the  text,  which,  as  we  know,  had  not  yet  been  pronounced 
sacrosanct ;  for  Col.  ii.  18,  for  instance,  nothing  but  cor- 
rupted texts  are  preserved,  either  making  no  sense  at  all 
or  else  consisting  of  the  worthless  conjectures  of  ancient 
copyists,  and  in  Kom.  vii.  25  the  first  part  of  the  verse 
at  any  rate  is  an  inadmissible  gloss.  Now,  these  interpola- 
tions can  be  perceived  by  the  eye  of  a  practised  student,  for 
where  it  is  a  question  of  the  distortion  of  the  original  form, 
a  happy  insight  may  guess  just  as  well  in  the  case  of  a  sacred 
as  of  a  profane  text  what  first  stood  at  a  certain  place  and 
was  then  superseded  by  an  early  corruption.  But  prudence 
and  moderation  are  here  a  sine  qua  non.  Conjecture  may 


§  55.  ]       THE   DOWNFALL   OF   THE    '  TEXTUS   RECEPTUS  '       G27 

never  simply  substitute  an  agreeable  for  a  disagreeable 
version  ;  it  is  merely  called  upon  to  supply  the  place  of  what 
is  absolutely  impossible,  and  the  limits  of  what  is  possible 
in  matters  of  thought  and  expression  are  extremely  varied 
according  to  the  literary  attainments  and  the  temperaments 
of  different  writers.  Certainly  a  conjecture  has  some  claim 
to  acceptance  in  the  text  if  it  is  able  to  explain  the  manner 
in  which  the  traditional  reading  arose  out  of  what  it  presumes 
to  have  been  the  oldest.  This  is  the  case,  for  instance, 
with  Cobet's  proposal  to  read  rjbiova  instead  of  7r\[e]iova 
in  Heb.  xi.  4,  because  in  the  old  Uncial  hand  the  forms 
of  the  two  words  are  extremely  alike ;  or  with  that  of  Bois, 
to  read  Kal  TYJS  STrifyavslas  avrov  fcal  rfjs  /BaaCKsias  avrov 
KY]pv%ov  TOV  \6yov  in  2  Tim.  iv.  1  fol.,  on  the  ground  that 
the  copyist  who  introduced  TTJV  sTnfyaveiav  and  rrjv  ftaa-i\elav 
had  not  perceived  the  reference  of  the  genitives  to  what 
followed,  and  had  understood  them  merely  as  the  objects  of 
SiapapTvpopai.  Still,  the  traditional  versions  are  not  abso- 
lutely inadmissible  in  these  cases,  and  as  yet  not  a  single 
conjecture  has  found  unanimous  acceptance  in  the  New  Testa- 
ment text,  even  with  those  who  do  not  make  a  principle  of 
rejecting  them. 

At  a  time  when  the  secret  of  the  Higher  Criticism 
appears  to  many  to  lie  in  the  dissection  and  piecing  together 
of  the  New  Testament,  there  is  some  danger  that  in  the 
Lower  Criticism  also,  inventive  addition  and  arbitrary 
omission  may  gain  the  upper  hand ;  in  Holland  the  task  of 
re-creating  the  text  in  this  way  is  already  in  high  favour, 
and  in  France  and  Germany,  too,  a  few  critics  are  beginning 
to  practise  the  art.  J.  M.  S.  Baljon  has  made  a  tolerably 
complete  collection  of  the  material  in  question  in  the  notes  to 
his  «  Novum  Testamentum  graece '  (Groningen,  1898) ;  but  the 
modest  use  which  he  makes  of  such  conjectures  in  constituting 
his  text,  and  the  cautious  reserve  manifested  by  all  exegetes 
of  repute  in  dealing  with  these  proposals,  leave  room  for  the 
hope  that  this  branch  of  science  will  not  be  quite  discredited 
by  the  irresponsible  proceedings  of  certain  omniscient 
experts.  We  are  still  aware  that  in  an  obscure  path  the 
ars  nesciendi  is  the  best ;  we  know  that  our  ultimate  aim — 

8   8   2 


628      AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT   [CHAP.  in. 

that  of  determining  the  entire,  original  and  indisputable  text 
of  the  New  Testament  Books — is  not  to  be  attained  by  a 
light-hearted  reliance  on  what  are  at  best  but  possibilities  ; 
our  hope  lies  rather  in  pressing  back  slowly  and  devotedly 
from  the  points  of  light  into  the  darker  regions  around  and 
beyond  them,  and  in  thus  feeling  our  way  gradually  towards 
the  primitive  document  itself. 


INDEX 


ABBOT,  T.  Kv  127 

Abgar,  Epistle  of  Jesus  to,  52 

Acta  Scilitanorum,  492 

Ada  Pauli,  96,  512  ;  Origen  on,  524  ; 
excluded  from  Canon,  580  ;  in  Latin 
Church,  536 ;  connection  of  w. 
pseudo-Corinthian  Ep.,  540,  548, 
560 

Adrianus,  8 

Agrapha,  379,  393 

Alexandrinism,  171  fol.,  277,  310,  400 

Alogi,  reject  the  Apocalyse,  277  ;  the 
Fourth  Gospel,  403,  494,  519,  531 

Ambrosiaster,  537,  593,  600  (note) 

Ambrosius,  609 

Amelli,  G.,  611 

Ammonius,  587 

Amphilochius,  544,  562 

Andrew  of  Caesarea,  546,  595 

Antioch,  meeting  between  Peter  and 
Paul  at,  39,  69  ;  School  of,  546  fol., 
550 

Aphraates,  494,  539,  612 

Apocalypse  of  John,  external  history 
of  the,  465  fol.,  477  fol.,  519  fol., 
524  fol. ;  in  Greek  Church,  530-33  ; 
in  Latin  and  Syrian,  584-40 ;  sub- 
sequent history  of,  541-560  ;  distri- 
bution of  text  of,  575 

Apocalypses,  Jewish,  265  fol.,  466; 
Evangelistic,  260  ;  Pauline,  64  fol., 
260 

Apocrypha,  52,  54  ;  acceptance  of  in 
the  Church,  535  fol.,  537  fol.,  540, 
546  fol. ;  during  Reformation  period, 
551,  554  ;  distinction  between 
Canonical  writings  and,  562  fol. 

Apocrypha,  Jewish,  60  ;  employed  in 
Epistle  of  Jude,  231 ;  absent  in  2. 
Peter,  238  ;  quoted  by  Paul,  464 

Apocryphal  Gospels,  337,  362,  381-3, 
489  (note),  491  fol.,  513,  526;  Acts 
of  Apostles,  524,  526,  536 

Apollonius,  201 

Apostles,  Did,acU  of  the  Twelve,  2, 
470,  475  (note),  486  ;  referred  to  by 


Clement,  500;  in  Greek  Church, 
521 ;  rejected  by  Eusebius,  526, 535 
545,  548,  500 

Apostolic  Canons  and  Constitutions, 
544,  548 

Aquila  and  Prisca,  as  authors  of 
Hebrews,  148,  169,  170 

Arethas,  546 

Aristion,  329,  407,  415 

Armenians,  accept  pseudo-Corinthian 
correspondence,  551 

Armenian  Bible,  96,  540,  607 

Athanasius,  544-7 

Athenagoras,  492 

Aucher,  J.  B.,  614 

Augustine,  St.,  8,  9  ;  on  Cath.  Epistles, 
202 ;  on  Syn.  Gospels,  343,  534  ;  on 
Hebr.,  541  fol.,  544  ;  his  order  of  N. 
T.  books,  558 ;  on  the  Canon,  559, 
561,  563,  575  ;  on  variants  in  text, 
589;  his  Speculum,  600;  on  the 
Itala,  609.  Pseudo-Augustinian 
Quaestiones,  537  ;  Speculum,  544 

Autolycus,  492 


BALDENSPERGEK,  on  the  Fourth  Gospel, 
384,  423 

Baljon,  J.  M.  S.,  627 

Bardesanes,  539 

Barnabas,  Epistle  of,  2,  170,  180,  202 
fol.  470  fol.,  512  ;  in  Greek  Church, 
521,  531  ;  in  Canon  of  Eusebius, 
526,  529  ;  in  Catal.  Claromont.,  536, 
548,  560  ;  included  in  Cod.  Sinaiti- 
cus,  603.  B.  as  author  of  Hebrews, 
154,  170  fol.,  499,  534,  536 

Basil,  on  Ephesians,  139 

Basilides  the  Gnostic,  196,  489, 
525 

Biithgen,  F.,  614 

Batiffol,  P.,  534,  611 

Bauer,  Bruno,  28 

Baur,  F.  Christian  (cf.  Tubingen 
School),  4,  17-25  ;  on  1.  Thess.,  58  ; 
on  2.  Thess.,  62  ;  on  Romans,  103, 


630 


AX    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 


chs.  xv.  and  xvi.,  107 ;  on  Colossians, 
134  ;  on  Mark,  325  ;  heads  of  §*  1, 
3,8 

Bellarmine,  Cardinal,  551 

Belsheim,  3.,  611 

Bengel,  J.  A.,  620/oZ.,  624i 

Bentley,  Richard,  619 

Berger,  S.,  540,  555,  611 

Beyschlag,  W.,  215 

Beza,  Theodore,  554,  605,  617 

Bianchini,  G.,  611 

Bible,  date  of  name,  565 

BibliotJwca  sacra,  574 

Bickell,  G.,  discoverer  of  Gospel-frag- 
ment, 381 

Birt,  T.,  567,  574 

Blass,  182  ;  on  John  vii.  53-viii.  11, 
393,  443  fol.,  449  ;  on  2  recensions 
of  Acts,  451-6 

Bleek,  F.,  24,  148 

Bohmer,  E.,  102 

Bornemann,  F.  A.,  451,  453 

Bornemann,  W.  54 

Bousset,  on  connection  between  Apo- 
calypse and  Fourth  Gospel,  281 ;  on 
the  '  Presbyter  '  John,  408  ;  head  of 
§5 

Brandt,  W.,  292,  371 

Bretschneider,  K.  G.,  402 

Burkitt,  F.  C.,  8  (note),  611 


CAIUS  OF  ROME,  disputes  authenticity 
of  Apocalypse,  277,  519,  531  fol. ; 
refuted  by  Hippolytus,  534 

Calvin,  553 

Canon  and  Canonicity,  562-4 

Carlstadt,  553  fol. 

Carriere,  540 

Cassiodorius,  8  fol.,  543,  581,  589 

Catenae,  the,  584,  599  fol. 

Catholic  Epistles,  the,  in  N.  T.  of 
Irenaeus,  499 ;  in  Muratorianum, 
501  ;  in  N.  T.  of  Origen,  523,  525  ; 
of  Eusebius,  526  ;  in  Greek  Church, 
530  fol.,  533,  545  ;  in  Latin  Church, 
534,  537,  541-3 ;  in  African,  535  ; 
in  Canon  MommMvitnius,  538;  in 
Syrian  Church,  539  fol.,  549-51  ;  in 
School  of  Antioch,  547  ;  during  Re- 
formation, 551-3 ;  variations  in 
order  of,  555-8  ;  final  acceptance  of, 
560 

Celsus,  395 

Cerinthus,  combated  in  1.  John  ?  245  ; 
reputed  author  of  Apocalypse,  '277. 
404,  406,  519,  532 

Chapters,  division  of  Text  into,  585- 


Chemnittus,  M.,  554 

Chrysostom,  on  Philemon,  127,  561 
(note) ;  on  Apocalypse,  546,  565,  000 
(note) 

Clarornontanus  (Catalogus),  530,  556 
(note) 

Clemen,  C.,  30  (note),  32 

Clement  of  Alexandria,  on  Hebrews, 
155 ;  on  Mark,  323  ;  on  Fourth 
Gospel,  403  ;  N.  T.  of,  495-500  ;  his 
conditions  of  Canonicity,  507,  514, 
519,  523,  586,  600  (note) 

Clement  of  Rome,  reputed  author  of 
Hebrews,  169;  1st  Epistle  of,  2  fol. 
its  relation  to  Hebr.,  158;  to  Past. 
Ep.,  180,  203,  212,  221 ;  relation  to 
James,  224  ;  used  by  2.  Pet.  i':j'.i. 
470;  as  authority  on  Canon,  475, 
481,485;  read  in  Corinthian  Church, 
488;  in  Ep.  of  Polycarp,  41)1; 
quoted  by  Irenaeus  and  Clement  Alex. 
500,  508,  512 ;  included  in  Canon, 
517 ;  Eusebius's  view  of,  529 ;  in 
Greek  Church,  531,  541,  548;  in 
Syrian  Bible,  551 ;  final  rejection  of, 
500  ;  in  Codex  A,  004.  2nd  Ep.  of, 
203,  471  fol,  475,  485,  548,  551, 
604.  De  Virginitate,  550  fol. 

Clement  VIII.,  Pope,  609,  617 

Codex  D,  326,  451-5,  582,  605  fol., 
624 

Codex  A  (Gospels)  580,  604 

Colani,  Timothee,  17 

Comma  Johanneum,  552,  598,  618 

Commodianus,  537 

Coinplutensian  Polyglot,  616-018 

Cone,  O.,  33 

Conybeare,  F.  C.,  317,  329 

Copts,  549,  007 

Corinth,  apocryphal  correspondence  of 
with  Paul,  90,  540,  549,  551 

Comely,  16,  561 

Corssen,  P.,  402,  404,  453,  611 

Cosmas  Indicopleustes,  547,  549 

Credner,  C.  A.,  16,  459 

Curcellaeus,  Stephen,  618  fol. 

Curetonianus,  the,  613  fol. 

Curtius,  Ernst,  444 

Cyprian,  534  fol.,  557,  600  fol.,  610. 
Pseudo-Cypi  ianic  writings.  ~>'2,  535 

Cyril  of  Jerusalem,  544 


Damascus,  journey  of  Paul  to.  35  ;  his 
sojourn  at.  M,  40;  flight  from,  U 
Church  of.  I '2 

Damasus,  Pope,  542,  564,  608 

Delff,  395,  408 


INDEX 


631 


Delisle,  L.,  611 

Delitzsch,  F.,  148 

DiaU'ssaron,  of   Tatian,  493  fol,  539 

fol ;  of  Ammonius,  587  ;   editions, 

614 
Dionysius  of  Alexandria,  201,  406  ;  on 

Apocalypse,  532,  586 
Dionysius  Bar  Salibi,  551 
Dobschiitz,  E.  von,  584,  611 
Doctrina  Addm'i,  429 
Diisterdieck,  F.,  31 
Dziatzko,  567 


KP.IOX,  404  ;  Ebionites,  304 

Ebrard,  H.,  22 

Egyptians,  Gospel  ace.  to  the,  497 

Eiohhorn,  J.  G.,  15,  345 

Elzevier,  brothers,  618 

Ephraim,  on  Diatessaron,  494 ;  on 
Syrian  Canon,  539  fol,  550,  600 
(note),  612,  614 

Epiphanius,  oi4 

Erasmus.  551 ;  text  of,  609,  616  fol. 

Eucherius  of  Lyons,  8 

Eugenius  IV.,  Pope,  558 

Eusebius,  9,  201,  294 ;  on  Matt.  302 ; 
on  Mark,  323 ;  on  Luke,  330 ;  on 
John  vii.  53-viii.  11,  393  ;  on 
Fourth  Gospel,  404  ;  on  '  Presbyter  ' 
John,  406;  relation  of  to  Papias, 
486  fol,  499,  521 ;  classification  of 
Scriptures,  525-9,  541,  544  fol,  557, 
578  ;  divides  Gospels  into  chapters, 
587,  603 

Euthalius,  583-5 

Ewald,  P.,  292 

Ewald,  H.,  23 


FELL,  J.,  619 

Ferrar,  602 

Firmicus  Maternus,  535 

Forgeries,  see  Pseudepigrapha 

Fuller,  H.,  261 

Funk,  F.  X.,  468 


GAETANO,  Cardinal,  551 

Gardthausen,  V.,  567 

Gebhardt,  0.  von,  468,  567,  604,  624 

Gelasius,  Pope,  564,  598 

Gerhard  of  Maestricht,  619 

Gibson,  Margaret,  D.,  613 

Gieseler,  344 

Gnosticism,  Gnostics,  in  relation  to 
Colossians,  134  fol,  142  ;  combated 
in  Past.  Epistles,  176,  195  fol ;  in 
Ep.  of  James,  225  fol ;  in  Jude,  230 


fol;  in  -2.  IVter,  '23'.);  in  I.John, 
244  fol ;  in  Apocalypse,  283,  381 ; 
in  relation  to  Fourth  Gospel,  401 
fol,  429  ;  no  trace  of  in  Acts,  436, 
480,  488  fol,  511,  517  .568; 

accused  of  falsifying  text,  593 

Godet,  F.,  25  fol ;  on  1.  Cor.,  78  ;  on 
Komans,  102 ;  on  Luke,  329 ;  on 
Synoptic  question,  344  ;  on  Fourth 
Gospel,  383 

::ig,  F.,  8  (note) 

Gould,  E.,  317 

Grafe,  E.,  102 

Gregory  the  Great,  561 

Gregory  of  Nazianzus,  544 

Gregory,  C.  R.,  567,  576,  602  fol,  622 

Grenfell  and  Hunt,  Logia  discovered 
by,  378 

Griesbach,  J.  J.,  325,  345,  620 

Grotius,  Hugo,  10 

Guerecke,  22 

Gunkel,  H.,  261 

Gwynn,  J.,  614 

HADORN,  W.,  317 

Hagge,  H.,  30 

Handmann,  R.,  304  (note) 

Haring,  T.,  241 

Harnack,  Adolf,  26  fol ;  on  Hebrews, 
167  fol ;  on  Past.  Epistles,  198  ;  on 
1.  Peter,  213  fol ;  on  James,  221, 
228  ;  on  3.  John,  253  ;  on  Matt., 
308,  315  ;  on  Magnificat,  337  ;  on 
*  Presbyter  '  John,  408  ;  on  2  recen- 
sions of  Acts,  454 ;  on  pseudo- 
Corinthian  Epistles,  540,  548  ;  heads 
of  §§  3, 12,  13,  15, 16,  20, 23,  26,  27, 
34,35 

Harris,  R.,  606 

Harwood,  620 

Hase,  K.,  23 

Hauck,  1  (note),  584 

Haupt,  E.,  118,  127 

Hausrath,  A.,  32  ;  on  2.  Cor.,  97 

Haussleiter,  J.,  459,  611 

Hawkins,  J.  C.,  295 

Headlam,  A.,  102 

Hebrews,  Ep.  to  the,  §  12;  Tertull. 
and  Iren.  on,  500 ;  absent  fr. 
Murator.,  502  ;  Origen  on,  523,  525  ; 
in  Latin  Church,  534-7,  541-4 ;  in 
Syrian,  540  ;  in  Reformation  age, 
551-3 ;  variations  in  order  of,  555 
fol,  560  fol 

Hebrews,  Gospel  ace.  to  the,  relation 
to  Matt.,  304,  381,  393,  486,  524  ;  in 
classif.  of  Eusebius,  526  ;  finally  re- 
jected, 530  ;  in  Greek  Church,  548 

Hegesippus,  220,  488 


632          AN    INTRODUCTION   TO   THE   NEW   TESTAMENT 


Heineke,  K.,  293 

Heinrici,  G.,  78 

Hengstenberg,  E.,  261 

Heracleensis,  612  fol. 

Heracleon,  401,  524 

Hermas,  Shepherd  of,  3,  221,  224  fol., 
257,  266,  279,  466,  470  ;  in  N.  T.  of 
Irenaeus,  Tertull.  and  Clem.,  500  ;  in 
Murator.,  501,  505  fol.,  508,  514, 
517;  in  Greek  Church,  521,  531, 
541,  545;  in  Origen,  524  fol.;  in 
classif.  of  Eusebius,  526,  529  ;  in 
Latin  Church,  534-6 ;  rejection  of, 
560  ;  in  Cod.  Sinaiticus,  603 

Hesse,  F.  H.,  174 

Hesychius,  598 

Hieronymus  (see  Jerome) 

Hierosolymitanum,  613 

Hilary,  537,  568  (note) 

Hilgenfeld,  A.,  17,  20-22  ;  on  2  recen- 
sions of  Acts,  453,  625 

Hippolytus,  520,  534 

Hofmann,  C.  G.,  12  (note) 

Hofmann,  J.  C.  K.  von,  23,  459 

Holsten,  Carl,  17,  20  ;  heads  of  §§  6, 
7,9 

Holtzmann,  H.  J.,  4,  25  fol.  ;  on  Col. 
and  Eph.,  137,  146,  460;  his 
'  Hand-Commentar,'  heads  of 
almost  all  §§  down  to  §  32  inclus. 

Holtzmann,  0.,  384 

Holzhey,  C.,  614 

Hormisdas,  Pope,  564 

Hort,  F.  J.  A.,  623  fol. 

Huck,  A.,  293 

Hug,  J.  L.,  15  fol. 

Hugues  de  St.  Victor,  9 

Hupfeld,  H.,  1 

Hiither,  J.  E.,  31 


IGNATIUS,  Epistles  of,  470,  475,  488 

Innocent  I.,  Pope,  542,  557 

Irenaeus,  18,  285  ;  on  Matt.  302,  304  ; 

on  Mark,  323 ;  on  Luke,  330,  377 ; 

on  John,  403-0,  427  ;  relation  of  to 

Papias,  487 ;  N.  T.  of,  495-500,  507, 

514,  531,  534,  559,  601 
Isidore,  9 
Itala,  the,  606,  608-611,  624  fol. 


JEUOMK,  9,  33,  127 ;  on  Eph.,  139 ;  on 
Matt.,  304;  on  app.  to  Mark,  328, 
534;  on  Hebr.,  541,  544,  557; 
Comrn.  on  J'li Hon.,  561  (note),  576, 
">7s  ;  on  subdivision  of  texts,  581, 
587,  589,  598  fol.,  600  (note) ;  con- 
nection of  with  Vulgate,  608-11 


John  of  Damascus,  546,  548 
Josephus,   220,  336,  420;   connection 

of  Acts  with,  436,  583 
Junilius,  8  fol.,  543,  550 
Justin  Martyr,  Past.  Ep.  not  quoted  in 

writings  of,  180,  221 ;  on  Apoc.  276, 

405  ;  on  the  Gospels,  294,  376,  426 ; 

his  views  on  Gospels  and  other  N.  T. 

writings,  483-6,  510,  600  (note) 

KAHLEB,  M.,  68 

Karl,  W.,  241 

Kautsch,  E.,  256 

Kerygma  Petri,  Origen  on,  524,  528 

rejection  of,  560 
Kihn,  H.,  9  (note) 
Kirchhofer,  J.,  459 
Kliefoth,  T.,  261 

Klopper,  A.,  heads  of  §§  5,  7,  9,  11 
Klostermann,  A.,  317 
Kostlin,  K.  E.,  17 
Krenkel,  M.,  32 
Kriiger,  G.,  1 
Kuhl,  E.,  204 

LACHMANN,  Carl,  591,  621  fol. 

Lactantius,  534 

Lagarde,  P.  de,  607 

Lange,  J.  P.,  22 

Langton,  Stephen,  586 

Laodicea,  possible   address   of  Ephe- 

sians,  140  fol. 
Laodiceans,   Epistle   of  Paul  to  the, 

140  fol.,  559  ;  forged  Ep.,  502,  506  ; 

history  of,  543  fol.,  548,  556 
Laodicean  Canons,  544,  563  (note) 
Lechler,  G.  V.,  23 
Lectionaries,  575 
Lekebusch,  E.,  430 
Lessing,  345 
Lewis,  Mrs.  A.  S.,  613 
Lightfoot,  J.  B.,  68,  118,  127 
Lipsius,  K.  A.,  head  of  Pt.  L,  and  of 

§§  6,  8,  9 
Lisco,  H.,  30 
Loisy,  A.,  460 
Loman,  A.  D.,  28 
Lucht,  H.,  103 

Lucian,  595;  Gospel-text  of,  598  fol. 
Lucifer  of  Cagliari,  536  fol. 
Liicke,  F.,  256 
Liinemann,  G.  K.  G.,  31 
Luther,  103,  225;   on  Canon,  552  (\ 

his  translation  of  Bible,  559,  562 
Luthardt,  C.  E.,  32,  383 

MABILLON,  Canon  of,  548 
van  Manen,  28 


INDEX 


633 


Mangold,  W.,  24,  103 

MunichacHiis.  /i  Mi,  561 

Marcion,  on  Kom.,  106 ;  on  Ephes., 
139  foL  ;  omits  Past.  Ep.  fr.  Canon, 
180  fol ;  his  Antitfieses,  193,  198, 
291,  491;  Canon  of,  488-90, 495,  517, 
557,  568;  his  emendation  of  texts, 
593  fol. 

Margival,  H.,  11  (note) 

Martin,  501 

Massebieau,  215,  227 

Matthai,  C.  F.,  621 

Melito,  Bishop  of  Sardis,  492 

Menegoz,  E.,  148 

Methodius  of  Olympus,  521,  531 

Merx,  A.,  614 

Michaelis,  J.  D.,  13 

Mill,  J.,  12,  619 

Mommsen,  T.,  on  date  of  Apoc.,  285  ; 
Canon  of,  538,  556  (note) 

Monarchian  Prologues,  404 

Monophysitism,  550  fol. 

Montanism.  142,225  ;  its  fondness  for 
Johannine  writings,  401,  429 ;  re- 
ferred to  in  Murator.,  505,  510,  513, 
517,  519 

Montfaucon,  B.,  de,  567 

Muratorianum,  the,  on  Ephes.,  139 ; 
on  Fourth  Gospel,  403-5  ;  description 
of,  501  fol.,  511,  514,  557,  562  fol. 


NABEK,  28 

Nestle,  E.,  567,  606,  624 

Nestorianism,  550,  553 

Nicephorus,  546,  548 

Nosgen,  32 

Novatian,  on  Hebr.,  154,  534 


OECOLAMPADIUS,  553 

Oltramare,  H.,  127 

Origen,  on  Eph.,  139 ;  on  Hebr.  155, 
157 ;  on  Cath.  Ep.,  201  ;  on  name 
of  '  Gospels,'  294 ;  on  Matt.,  302  ;  on 
4  Gospels,  503  ;  N.  T.  of,  521-5,  544 
558,  576 ;  introduces  Colometric 
division,  581,  583,  586 ;  on  textual 
corruption,  589,  595,  598,  600  (note), 
601 

Overbeck,  F.,  148,  430,  459 

Oxyrhynchus,  Logia  discovered  at,  378 

Original  Gospel,  hypothesis  of  the, 
345,  468 


PAMPHILUS,  576 

Papias,  1.  Pet.  quoted  by,  212,  240  ;  on 
Matt.  302-7,  378;  on  Mark,  317-19, 


323;  connection   of  with    Aristion, 
ii'J'.i  ;   unacquainted  with  LuL 
336,  347,  ;   connection  of 

with  John  vii.  53-viii.  1 1,  :>'.»:*  ;  on 
Johannine  question,  406-9,  427;  his 
writings  and  method  of  collecting 
information,  486-8,  514  fol. 

Paul  of  Nisibis,  9 

Pelagius,  537 

Pericopae,  in  N.  T.  texts,  575,  5s« 

Peshitto,  the,  contents  of,  549 ;  history 
of,  612  fol. 

Peter,  Acts  of,  534 

Peter,  Apocalypse  of,  used  in  2.  Pet., 
239,  257  ;  included  in  Murator.,  501 
fol.,  506 ;  in  Gr.  Church,  521,  548 ; 
in  classif.  of  Eusebius,  526  fol. ;  re- 
jection of,  530,  560 ;  in  Latin 
Church,  536 

Peter,  Gospel  ace.  to,  3, 381,  512  ;  pro- 
hibited by  Bp.  Serapion,  520  fol. ; 
final  rejection  of,  530 

Pfleiderer,  O.,  17,  22,  33 

Philastrius  of  Brescia,  534,  541,  558 
(note) 

Philemon,  Epistle  to,  in  Syrian  Canon, 
540 ;  defence  of  by  Jerome,  561 
(note) 

Philo,  connection  of  with  author  of 
Hebrews,  171  fol.,  with  Fourth 
Gospel,  400 

Philocalia,  the,  522 

Philoxenus,  Bp.  of  Hierapolis,  612 

Photius,  546 

Pierson,  A.,  28 

Plummer,  A.,  329 

Polycarp,  on  Philipp.,  124  ;  acquainted 
w.  Past.  Ep.  180;  w.  1.  Pet.,  212, 
377  ;  connection  of  w.  John,  403, 40o 
fol..  427, 470 ;  on  Canonical  authori- 
ties, 475  ;  Epistle  of,  491 

Polycrates,  Bp.  of  Ephesus,  406,  408 

Pott,  A.,  453 

Priscillian,  535-7,  564 

Pritius,  J.  G.,  12  fol. 
!   Psalms  of   Solomon,  257 ;   in   Codex 

Alex.,  604 

j  Pseudepigrapha,  52-4,  199 ;  in  con- 
nection w.  2.  Peter,  240  fol.  ;  502, 
504,  506,  520  fol,  564 

Pseudo-Athanasian  Synopsis,  547  fol. 


RABIGER,  J.  F.,  78 

Eamsay,  W.  M.,  33,  68 

Eenan,  E.,  23,  32,   292  ;    on   Fourth 

Gospel,  395 
Kesch,  A.,  368 
Beuss,  E.,  16,  23,  615 


634 


AN    INTRODUCTION    TO    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 


Rhode,  E.,  567 

Riehm,  Prof.,  172 

Riggenbach,  E.,  32,  103 

Ritschl,  A.,  24  fol. 

Rivetus,  A.,  10  (note) 

Robinson,  J.  A.,  on  Euthalius,  584 

Rohrbach,  P.,  317 

Ropes,  J.  H.,  368 

Rothe,  R.,  241 

Rovers,  M.  A.  N.,  30 

Rufinus,  8/oZ.,  541,  557 

Riiegg,  A.,  621 

Rusnbrooke,  W.  G.,  293 


SABATIER,  A.,  33 ;  on  Apoc.,  287  (note) 

Sanday,  W.,  102,  611 

Schafer,  A.,  16 

Schanz,  P.,  301,  317,  329 

Schenkel,  D.,  23 

Scherer,  Edmond,  17 

Schlatter,  A.,  68,  102 

Schleiermacher,  F.,  14,  24;  on  Past. 

Ep.,     177;     on     Matt.,     304;     on 

Synoptic  question,  346,  363 
Schmiedel,  P.  W.,  heads  of  Pts.  I.  and 

II.,  and  of  §§  4,  7,  32 
Schmidt,  P.,  54 
Schoen,  H.,  287  (note) 
Scholz,  A.,  568,  621 
Scholten,  J.  H.,  17  ;  on  Acts,  433 
Sehiirer,  E.,  heads  of  §§  3,  6,  21,  31 
Schulz,  David,  on  Rom.  xvi.,  109 
Schwegler,  A.,  17,  21 
Schweizer,  A.,  395 
Scrivener,  567,  603 
Semler,  J.  S.,  13  fol,  620 
Serapion,  Bp.  of  Antioch,  474,  520 
Sieffert,  F.,  on  Galat.,  31,  68 
Simon,  Richard,  10-12,  619 
Sinaiticus,   Codex,   596,  603;    Syriac 

translation,  613  fol. 
Sixtus,  V.,  Pope,  609,  617 
Sixtus  of  Siena,  10,  551 
Socrates,  201 
Soden,   H.  von,  31 ;  on  1.  Pet.,  208 ; 

heads  of  §§  11.  12,  13,  15,  16 
Soltau,  W.,  301,  315  fol. 
Soter,  Bp.  of  Rome,  488 
Spinoza,  11 
Spitta,  F.,  on  James,  227 ;  on  Apoc., 

287  (note)  ;  on  Acts,  449 ;  heads  of 

§§  3,  5,  13,  16,  18,  22,  30,  32 
Stephanus,  R.,  609,  617 
Stichometry,  582  fol,  585 
Straatmann,  J.  W.,  30 
Strauss,  D.  F.,  17 
Sulze,  E.,  30 
Synopses  of  Gospels,  293 


TALMUD,  the,  372 

Tatian,  relation  of  to  Justin,  485,  491, 
495,  595  ;  see  Diatessaron 

Tertullian,  18;  on  Acts  of  Thekla, 
53  ;  on  Eph.,  139 ;  on  Hebr.,  154 ; 
on  N.  T.  Canon,  495-500,  507,  514, 
559 ;  on  Textual  questions,  568, 
572,  594,  600  (note),  610 

Thekla,  Acts  of,  53 

Themison,  201 

Theodoretus,  Bp.  of  Cyrus,  494,  502 ; 
disputes  Apoc.,  546 

Theodore  of  Mopsuestia,  on  Philem., 
127,  561  (note) ;  on  Cath.  Ep.  547 ; 
on  form  of  texts,  576 

Theophilus  of  Antioch,  492 

Thiersch,  H.,  22 

Tischendorf,  C.  von.  576;  his  dis- 
covery of  Sinaiticus,  603 ;  his  edi- 
tions of  Text,  622  fol 

Tregelles,  S.  P.,  623 

Trent,  Council  of,  552,  559,  609 

Triphyllius  of  Ledra,  595 

Tubingen  School,  the  (cf.  Baur),  17- 
25,  54 ;  disputes  authent.  of  1. 
Thess.,  58  fol ;  of  Rom.  xv.  and  xvi., 
107;  of  Philipp.,  123;  of  Philem., 
126;  of  Col.,  134-7;  of  Eph.,  142, 
206  ;  on  Apoc.,  274  ;  on  Synoptic 
question,  345  ;  on  Fourth  Gospel,  401 

Tyconius,  8 


ULFILAS,  his  translation  of  Bible,  607 
Usteri,  J.  M.,  204 


VALENTINE,  401,  489,  505 

Verses,  division  of  Text  into,  617 

Victorinus,  270  fol 

Vischer,  E.,  286 

Vogel,  T.,  329  ;  on  Acts,  453 

Volkmar,  G.,  17,  102 ;  on  Apoc.,  274, 
292 ;  on  Mark,  321,  324,  459 

Volter,  D.,  28,  30,  286 

Vulgate,  the,  544,  552,  558,  561  ;  re- 
lation of  to  Itala,  608-11 


WAGE,  620 

Weiss,  Bernhard,  4,  25  fol,  31 ;  on 
Past.  Ep.,  193  ;  on  Apoc.,  270  ;  on 
Synopt.  question,  364 ;  on  two  re- 
censions of  Acts,  453,  625,  460 ; 
heads  of  §§3,  8,  9,  12,  13,  19, 
Bk.  III.,  §§'24,  25,  26,  27,  30 

Weiss,  J.,  317,  329,  430 

Weisse,  C.  H.,  30,  292;  on  Syn.  ques- 
tion, 347;  on  Fourth  Gospel,  395 


INDEX 


635 


Weizsacker,  Carl   von,  27  ;   on  Apoc. 

286  ;  heads  of  Parts  I.  and  II.,  and 

§§  19,  23,30 

Wellhausen,  J.,  256,  295,  614 
Wendt,  H.  H.,  384,  395,  430 ;  on  Acts, 

449 
Wernle,   P.,  292;   on   Syn.   question, 

359 
Westcott,  B.  F.,  460;  his  edition  of 

Text,  623  fol. 

Wette,  W.  M.  L.  de,  15,  24,  430 
Wettstein,  J.  J.,  his  classif.  of  texts, 

602  ;  edition  of  Text,  619 
Weyland,  T.  G.,  287  (note) 
Weymouth,  B.  F.,  624 
White,  H.  J.,  611,  614 
Wiesinger,  241 
Wilke,  C.  G.,  347 


Wordsworth,   J.    (Bp.   of    Salisbury), 

611 
Wrede,  W.,  204,  384 

\Yri"ht,  A.,  2M 
Wund.-rlicli.  K..  7*.  102.  :J2'.I 


ZACCAGNI,  L.  A.,  583  fol. 

Zahn,  T.,  1,  25-27,  33 ;  on  Gal.,  73, 
78;  on  Eph.,  139;  on  Hebr.,  160, 
1C>7  ;  on  Past.  Ep.  187  fol. ,  191 ;  on 

1.  Pet.,  208, 211 ;  on  James,  224 ;  on 

2.  Pet.,  236  ;  on  1.  John,  243,  245  ; 
on   2   recensions   of   Acts,  453;  on 
Canon,  459,  614 

Zeller,  E.,  17,  430 
Zonaras,  John,  548 
Zwingli,  553,  562 


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